Wiped Out Hard Drive...

So a local college here in Logan had a free "Computer Clean Up" day. You took in your computer, and they would clean up any spyware, viruses, malware, etc... that was on the machine. I thought "sweet" so I took jenny's laptop in to get it cleaned up and my daughters computer (which use to be my old college computer). This was at 8:30 this morning. I got the computers back at like 7:00pm. The head of the IT department informed me that my wife's computer was so bad, it wouldn't update any new updates or drivers or anything and was so bogged down with viruses that he had to format the whole computer (luckily for him... and for me... he backed up all of her pictures and resume stuff and documents first). Then he proceeded to start w/ a clean computer and put back on the stuff that we wanted/needed to be on there. So now, her computer works like a brand new one. This guy, the head of the IT department, worked on this one computer for 10 1/2 hours. This was the only one that he touched (he had a group working with him on other ones). This got the gears in my head turning. (for some reason i can't stop that from happening... i always gotta connect the dots to God)

Wouldn't it be nice to have your life be a lot like a computer? Well, actually, when you think about it, it is. We learn new applications, save stuff in our lives, get bogged down, things rarely work the way we expect them to work, and we get caught up in viruses and spyware (sin and temptations). The awesome thing that exists, is when we sit back and realize how messed up our hard drives (lives) are, we have a way of formatting ourselves. If we're already a Christian, its looking to God and laying it all out before him and asking him to help us and forgive us, wipe us clean. If we're not a Christian, then there's a lot more virus infecting us. We need the original boot disk. We need the washing of Christ to take away all the junk and make us new. And again, just like the computer, we can save the pictures, the documents, and the things from our old lives. The bad part about that, a lot of times, (just as in computers), the very things we try to bring over to the clean slate with us, are the very things that are infected w/ the virus. Does that make sense? If in a computer, you want to bring over a file called, oh i dunno, friends.exe you can do that. You can have the file backed up and installed on the new hard drive. The problem however, is that the file, may be corrupted with the virus or whatever that you are trying to get rid of. So guess what happens when you put that file back on the clean computer. Right, it gets all messed up again. Well, with our lives, we try to carry over the same friends, the same lifestyles, the same bad habits we had when we were infected. The result? The same as with the computer.
My moral for this story? You've got to be careful what files you have backed up and re-installed. They may be the very files that got you into the mess in the first place.

Love God... Love people... Serve the world...
Jpack