Wednesday, August 24, 2016

            Ain’t technology grand? When I retired last year, I jammed ten years’ worth of sermons onto a single thumb-drive. That’s about 45 sermons a year, each about 20 minutes, each sermon taking about five to six hours to create and write, all adding up to – well, you do the math. I shredded all the hard copies.

I am not sure why exactly I am holding on to all these sermons. I haven’t done so when I have left my other churches. I have a very strong aversion to “dipping into the barrel” as they say and preaching a re-treaded sermon.  But this time, there were a couple of sermon series over the years that I hope to edit and refine and maybe turn into a book or two.

We bought a new desk-top computer for me to work on. I had begun to transfer the sermons over to the new computer when the thumb-drive went kaput. I did not panic although strong words were used. Certainly, I thought, in this day and age, that there would be some wizard techie who could work their magic and voodoo and help me get the material off the drive.

After our summer vacation I took the thumb-drive into the computer place. They reverently took my precious thumb-drive and told me that they would send it off to some mysterious Lourdes for such devices and phone me in a few weeks with what needs to be done and an estimate to do it. They warned me it could be as much $300. I winced. Technology may be grand but it doesn’t come cheap.

They phoned me about a week ago. The estimate was $600 and no guarantee that they could recover all the data. I will wait until there is a better and cheaper cure!  Fortunately, I did get about 5 years onto the desk-top computer including one of the sermon series I plan to work on.  I shall now by an external hard drive and use it for back-up. Live and learn.

We jam a lot of things into our lives, retaining memories of all the significant events that have happened to us, both good and not-so-good. The writer of Psalm 90 seemed to be having a particularly hard day and seems a little bitter about life. He seems to be overwhelmed by the futility of his mortality “You turn us back to dust…,” (Psalm 90:3, NIV)). He resigns himself to the reality that human life doesn’t have much value in God’s eyes, “For all our days pass away under your wrath and our years come to an end like a sigh,” (90:9).  He is a person looking at the thumb-drive of his life and asking, “We live for seventy years or so (with luck we might make it to eighty), and what do we have to show for it?” (Psalm 90:10, The Message). 

But then his attitude changes and his faith pick up. It is not as bad as he feared. There is a “cure” for his loss of hope and his feeling of loss of meaning and purpose to his life. The Psalmist finds the source of that hope in the same God to whom he had been complaining.      

Come back, God—how long do we have to wait?—

                        and treat your servants with kindness for a change.
             Surprise us with love at daybreak;
                       then we’ll skip and dance all the day long.
            Make up for the bad times with some good times;
                      we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime.
            Let your servants see what you’re best at—
                     the ways you rule and bless your children.
           And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us,
                     confirming the work that we do.
           Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!  (Psalm 90: 12-17, The Message)

Dale