The Dog Ate My Homework

That may as well be my excuse. The draft of my post for today just vanished from my CD. A whole day’s work gone somewhere into the belly of my computer where all my restore and explorer tricks could not resurrect it.

I don’t know what happened to it. I know I started working on it last Thursday in Wordpad. Then my computer told me to save it in some kind of Word version, which I did. When I opened it up yesterday morning, an error message came up and closed the draft. After that, I could not find it anymore.

I could find its shortcut icon but it just produces a message that the target document has been changed or moved so the shortcut will not behave properly anymore. Changed or moved where? My computer would only cough up its name, rank and serial number.

Does anybody know if computers are included in the provisions of the Geneva Convention?

My computer misbehaving on me! If anyone out there has an explanation and advice on how I could avoid this in the future, I sure would appreciate hearing from you.

Now, I know there is a technical explanation for what happened. Still, knowing that nothing in the believer’s life happens without it being known to our Father in heaven, I’m not putting it past him to actually have a message for me tucked away somewhere in the whole fiasco.

You see, I’ve lately been mulling over the direction I really wanted to take in this blogging business. Honestly, I started it only thinking that it’s free storage. I have always wanted to start a journal of sorts, listing down items in my prayer list, and tracking how the LORD answers each one. It was to be purely private to me. Then, once I started the blog, I learned that even if I kept commenters out, the site is still available to everyone in the internet. OK, I thought, no one would get hurt knowing how faithful my Father in heaven really is so I went ahead anyway.

Then, I made the mistake of looking around at other Christian blogs just to see what they were doing. That was like playing around near a raging tornado. As soon as I saw what the likes of Evangelical Underground, Amy’s Humble Musings, Wittenberg Gate, NickQueen.com, Transforming Sermons, The SHEEP’s Crib, TheJESUSFreak, etc. were doing, I was in the swirling, powerful vortex before I knew it.

Why, the potential for Jesus Christ is nearly unlimited. The blogs are immediately nationwide and worldwide. With a little promoting and faithfulness in prayer, one could possibly reach anyone who has a computer across the globe with the message of Christ!

But flying around in this huge whirlwind does not make much for good, purposeful navigation. I thought that to be a Christian blog I should look and sound just like these great pioneering peers I have mentioned above.

I credit Amy of Amy’s Humble Musings for opening my eyes to the futility of this thought (see her March 22, 2005 post). Yes, I can follow what great apologists and theologians say so thoroughly in their dissertations. It does not make me an apologist or a theologian. Yes, I have strong convictions about what goes on in the cultural, political, judicial, social, philosophical, ethical and just-about-everything-ical fields. It does not make me an expert in any of them. I’m no contender in any of them. If I jump head on and take on the great issues in them it only makes me at best a pretender.

Which brings me to my post for today which my dog ate (er...I forgot we only have a cat for a pet, now that Sweetie, our parakeet has moved on to pet heaven), or my computer swallowed. I was torn between what my mission statement is truly to be for The LORD My Dad and having to remain in the stream of things. I wanted to move on but I thought I should at least give a final say on the most sensitive issue of the day, the Terri Schiavo case. I was prepared to comment on and rebut point for point items of interest in Thursday’s Foxnews report on Terri’s death. I titled it, "To Come Clean And Move On." I was plugging away at it with all my heart that the draft was already at least a three parter by any prudent blogger’s standard.

Then the whole draft disappears.

You know what? I believe my Father in heaven is telling me, “Son, that part is already covered more than adequately by your more able brothers and sisters in Jesus. This is not why I called you to this site. Remember your first love. You wanted to call attention to my glory and faithfulness. You wanted to draw people to the intimacy that I seek in the relationship that I desire with you, your siblings, and your future siblings in my Son. You know, I wouldn’t exactly be disappointed if you stayed with what you felt you wanted to begin with.”

Obedience is better than sacrifice. It is an inimitable thrill to please the Father! I confess my sin, dear God. In Jesus' Name, please forgive me for straying away from the impression you laid in my heart when you first guided my steps toward blogging.

Honestly, there is that part in me that still wants to at least share here the clincher I wrote last Thursday in my three parter. But then again, if it means being something that I really am not, I’d much rather just let that whole post rest in my dog’s belly. Hope it doesn’t cause the poor dog indigestion.

Did I say dog? I mean, my computer.