Mike the Miracle Guy

“In another year, don’t bring it back to me. Get yourself a new one.”

Mike, my computer repair guy, was totally serious. He wasn’t being rude or discouraging my business. He just knows how badly I hate to get new computers, so this is the second time I’ve dragged it in for a clean-up; it has been stalling out and wasting my time, big time, for nigh on to two years, I’d wager.

The old one was like a piece of paper that had scratches and writing all over it. The one he installed was like a clean piece of paper with no writing.

Bless his heart, he installed a newer hard drive. Yes, used, but hey, this computer is a 2009 model and by his standards, woefully out of date.

He showed me the inside of my old hard drive, where normal people never go. He pointed to two to three little discs that look like CDs and said that the fork like mechanisms alongside go in to grab a file the way an old record player would find the music on an old disc (yeah, way, way back). He said that a single photo I had stored on there was less than a pinprick in size.

Photo by Markus Spiske raumrot.com. Creative Commons.

Knowing how many photos and documents—books, really, are stored on that thing, I understood. And marveled again at the miracles we expect out of our machines. How impatient we get when they don’t bring us what we want in under two seconds.

After I brought my computer back home, I plugged in all the wires (all by myself, I might add). My daughters plus husband had done all of my previous installs. I’m happy to say, now that I’ve fired it up, it is typing at normal speed and I’m not sitting here waiting for my machine to catch up to my fingers and brain. Miraculous.

If this is starting to sound religious, the next example Mike gave me was even more striking. When I asked what the difference was between the hard drives, he said the old one was like a piece of paper that had scratches and writing all over it. The one he installed was like a clean piece of paper with no writing.

An apt illustration for this writer. I’ve always been a sucker for a fresh piece of paper, a blank page in a journal, a word doc all opened up with nothing written on it. On it I can spill out my thoughts, my guts, my life. It’s like the first day of a new year, the commencing of a new term of school. Fresh clean paper. Nothing beats it.

Except maybe a clean hard drive. Which I can fill with hundreds and thousands of files made of simple 1s and 0s, still the basic language of most computer-speak. And to think of how we send and transfer those documents and photos filled with 1s and 0s and of minute, infinitesimal size, and get cranky when something goes wrong with all that. Let alone nifty tools like spell-check or just now trying to spell the tricky word infinitesimal. I right-click on the mouse to bring up the correct spelling, and bingo. There it is, quick. With my old hard drive, the computer was having to think really long and hard about my inquiries, and after doing that automatic function of right-clicking to get the right spelling and the machine stalling out for 15 seconds, I kept chiding myself, just look it up, lazy. (My mother and the 90-year-old crowd may not understand what I’m talking about here but that’s okay.)

This all totally brings me to God, who is in the clean slate or new hard drive business.

And that is even more miraculous. No matter how many times we mess up, God does a wipe over of our record and never bothers to remember how we’ve gone wrong before. We’re like babes fresh out of the womb: faultless, innocent, perfect.

Really. God is the real miracle performer. Thanks be to God.

For a free gospel of John booklet, write to MelodieD@MennoMedia.org or Another Way, 1251 Virginia Avenue, Harrisonburg, VA 22802.