Laptops and Robbers
by Andy Behrendt
In one of my first classes at Luther Seminary, we as students were repeatedly asked to consider "What God is up to" in a particular place and time. Although it seemed like a good thing to keep in mind, it got on my nerves sometimes. God's actions aren't exactly obvious, and I hardly consider myself capable of figuring them out.
With the unexplained failure of both of my computer's hard drives last week, however, I think I actually have an idea of what God was up to. Yeah, I know. Sounds ridiculous. But bear with me.
When I suddenly lost seven months worth of files on my beloved computer, I immediately started pondering whether God might be sending me a message about my priorities. If you've got a half-hour or so, you can read about all that in painstaking detail here. For those of you who did actually read my last post, I'll provide a little update.
Thanks to my awesome friend, Jake, I was able to recover virtually all my photos and music from my MacBook and, in a very welcome surprise, most all of my precious notes and audio recordings from my Early and Medieval Church History and Lutheran Confessional Writings courses. It also looks like I'll be able to recover all the stuff from my old external hard drive, which for some reason failed at the same time my MacBook crashed. Due to technical specifics that aren't worth explaining, a bunch of my seminary stuff is apparently gone for good. But even though I'll be mourning the loss of my PowerPoint presentation on Count Zinzendorf for a while, I am extremely happy about what I was able to get back. And I did learn a lesson about not taking my computer so seriously.
But that's not the really theologically interesting part. That came Monday, when my dad called. Turns out that Sunday night, someone broke into my home church in Green Bay, where my dad is the pastor. With a frightening savvy for burglary and, sadly, an apparent awareness of the church's inner workings, the burglar or burglars ripped the church's safe out of its groundings and, traveling into the church offices through the ceiling, made off with two computer monitors, a multipurpose laptop and some backup hard drives. For whatever reason, he/she/they also took a bunch of pizzas, a pizza oven and the shoddier of the kitchen's two microwaves.
But the thief or thieves didn't get my dad's laptop. That's because, in a rare circumstance, particularly for a Sunday night, he had brought it home from the church. That's because he was without another laptop at home — I had asked him to send his personal laptop here, to Minnesota, when my mom came to visit last weekend. And that's only because both of my hard drives hit the skids.
I shared my dad's astonishment when he explained all this to me on Monday, while the church was busy with security adjustments. Someone had done a terrible thing, and I'm praying for whoever this was. But if that laptop would have been stolen, along with those backup drives, my dad would have lost just about everything. And that surely would have happened, were it not for my own mysterious computer mishaps. Certainly, all the files and programs that help my dad do God's work were more important than my copious notes from The Church and Music or Creation and the Triune God (no offense to Dr. Westermeyer and Dr. Marga). I wondered if God had come to the same conclusion. It was enough to make me shake my head and laugh as my wife and I were leaving for our anniversary dinner on Monday evening.
God was up to something. This time, I'm quite sure of it, although I can't pretend to understand how it happened. I'm not about to argue that God pointed his finger at the general vicinity of my apartment complex and zapped my two hard drives. I do know, however, that there aren't many other wild coincidences that would have resulted in my dad's computer resting safely at home that night. It's enough to make you start pondering atonement theories of laptops: "One dies so that another might be saved" — I mean, come on. But it does make me feel better to think that maybe, just maybe, I lost all that data for a higher purpose.
That God of ours. He's always up to something.
With the unexplained failure of both of my computer's hard drives last week, however, I think I actually have an idea of what God was up to. Yeah, I know. Sounds ridiculous. But bear with me.
When I suddenly lost seven months worth of files on my beloved computer, I immediately started pondering whether God might be sending me a message about my priorities. If you've got a half-hour or so, you can read about all that in painstaking detail here. For those of you who did actually read my last post, I'll provide a little update.
Thanks to my awesome friend, Jake, I was able to recover virtually all my photos and music from my MacBook and, in a very welcome surprise, most all of my precious notes and audio recordings from my Early and Medieval Church History and Lutheran Confessional Writings courses. It also looks like I'll be able to recover all the stuff from my old external hard drive, which for some reason failed at the same time my MacBook crashed. Due to technical specifics that aren't worth explaining, a bunch of my seminary stuff is apparently gone for good. But even though I'll be mourning the loss of my PowerPoint presentation on Count Zinzendorf for a while, I am extremely happy about what I was able to get back. And I did learn a lesson about not taking my computer so seriously.
But that's not the really theologically interesting part. That came Monday, when my dad called. Turns out that Sunday night, someone broke into my home church in Green Bay, where my dad is the pastor. With a frightening savvy for burglary and, sadly, an apparent awareness of the church's inner workings, the burglar or burglars ripped the church's safe out of its groundings and, traveling into the church offices through the ceiling, made off with two computer monitors, a multipurpose laptop and some backup hard drives. For whatever reason, he/she/they also took a bunch of pizzas, a pizza oven and the shoddier of the kitchen's two microwaves.
But the thief or thieves didn't get my dad's laptop. That's because, in a rare circumstance, particularly for a Sunday night, he had brought it home from the church. That's because he was without another laptop at home — I had asked him to send his personal laptop here, to Minnesota, when my mom came to visit last weekend. And that's only because both of my hard drives hit the skids.
I shared my dad's astonishment when he explained all this to me on Monday, while the church was busy with security adjustments. Someone had done a terrible thing, and I'm praying for whoever this was. But if that laptop would have been stolen, along with those backup drives, my dad would have lost just about everything. And that surely would have happened, were it not for my own mysterious computer mishaps. Certainly, all the files and programs that help my dad do God's work were more important than my copious notes from The Church and Music or Creation and the Triune God (no offense to Dr. Westermeyer and Dr. Marga). I wondered if God had come to the same conclusion. It was enough to make me shake my head and laugh as my wife and I were leaving for our anniversary dinner on Monday evening.
God was up to something. This time, I'm quite sure of it, although I can't pretend to understand how it happened. I'm not about to argue that God pointed his finger at the general vicinity of my apartment complex and zapped my two hard drives. I do know, however, that there aren't many other wild coincidences that would have resulted in my dad's computer resting safely at home that night. It's enough to make you start pondering atonement theories of laptops: "One dies so that another might be saved" — I mean, come on. But it does make me feel better to think that maybe, just maybe, I lost all that data for a higher purpose.
That God of ours. He's always up to something.
posted by Andy Behrendt at 9:02 PM
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