Reboot

After nearly three weeks of frustration, my laptop finally arrived back to my office on Saturday afternoon (well, actually I had to go pick it up from DHL, but at that point I was more than happy to doso). Turns out that if you spill beer on your computer and it messes with your motherboard the warranty doesn’t so much apply. Shocking, I know, but it was worth a shot. I think that as retribution for my idiocy, Dell decided to ‘forget’ to mail my computer back for almost a week (they actually admitted to that after about 15 redirected phone calls).

At any rate it is back and is, for the moment, booting and rebooting just fine. And even if it doesn’t I’m just ok with that for now, because at least I have it back.

I wonder if God feels the same way about us sometimes? How often do we do something stupid, or just mess up without really realizing it, and then go ‘on the fritz’ for a while? Often times we are ashamed to keep trying with God, other times we just go through periods of not caring. So we, in a sense, go into this blackout phase with God where he just isn’t visible or apparent in our lives. Sometimes this can look like willful and wanton neglect and rebellion, other times it can just be spiritual indifference – often I think it’s somewhere in the middle.

As I drove home from church on Sunday morning, wondering how in the heck it was August and where July went, I realized that I had basically spent a month in this blackout phase. Yeah there were some good quiet times, I read some good books and had some good spiritual conversations, but for the most part I floated through July in some sort of opaque oblivion to what was going on immediately around me or was in my immediate future.

But like my laptop, when I consciously returned over the last week, it has been refreshing to find that God doesn’t care how we reboot, as long as we do reboot. Who knows, maybe some time in the wilderness is a good thing – afterall it worked pretty well for Jesus, David, Moses and others. But I tell you what, it definitely feels better to be back fully in God’s presence, even if it takes a little longer than usual to get booted up in the morning sometimes.

I’ll be in meetings all this week. It’ll be a stark contrast and, really, an opportunity to learn more about myself. If you know me at all, you know that I like to say that I ‘hate meetings.’ Just hate ‘em. Hate going to them, hate paying attention, hate sitting down for so long, hate talking about ‘how I feel,’ etc, etc. But at the same time that I am not looking forward to my staff meetings, I am so looking forward to my leadership meeting at the beach at the end of the week. Stay tuned for an interesting psychological study that I’m sure will reveal some level of selfishness, control and engagement issues for me.

Pressing on to be Godly, without being so religious…..