A Lesson Learned the Hard Way

Tonight I'm asking for prayers, and sharing a word of advice for my friends who depend on their computers.

The two are intertwined, so I think if I share the prayer request, you'll understand the advice. First, what happened:

Last week, my computer froze up a few times. It hadn't happened before, so I thought I must have had a lot of spyware on it. I tried to get rid of it, but the freezing-up happened again. Then on Wednesday I had trouble getting on my computer it was so slow. But, coincidentally, I had the 24-hour flu, and didn't get out of bed except for a few hours.

By Thursday, it was clear that something was very wrong with my computer. On Friday, I got the bad news: my hard drive had crashed. Worse still, the technician couldn't get any data off it. Even worse, my last back up had been about a month ago.

So, now I'm waiting for him to come back on Monday with a new hard drive. And one more attempt to pull data off the old drive.

Herein lies the prayer request. Please pray that he is able to get some Word documents off for me. I've done a lot of work in the past month that will be difficult to re-create. Specifically for the P31 Woman magazine, and She Speaks.

I'm kicking myself for a few things this weekend. Of course, the first is not backing up my work!!! I know better. The second is not taking better care of a piece of equipment that allows me to do so much ministry. I became complacent because it was a relatively new computer - out of warranty, though.

So my advice to you my friend if you depend on your computer - Back it up every day. And have regular maintenance to make sure it's free of bugs and viruses. The internet is getting more and more malicious. Not surprising - since so many Christians are using the Internet to encourage each other and share the Gospel! I'm reminded once again we have an enemy who hates what we are doing. (And, by the way, I'm not afraid. 'Cause my God is bigger than him!)

On Monday, I will be subscribing to Carbonite, which backs up automatically every night, but only the files I have changed. I'm not recommending this service, only sharing what was recommended to me by a friend, and then confirmed by the computer tech.

I believe that every lesson we learn in this life comes with a price. This lesson was an expensive one for me. My apologies to those of you who posted a comment on communicating with teens. As soon as I have computer and e-mail access, I'll post the winner of the Starbucks card. I pray it's Monday afternoon.

In His Love,
Glynnis