A Faulty Operating System

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by:  Staci Stallings

If you’ve been reading the blog this past month, you know my computer did a swan dive into flatline land a few weeks ago.  It was not a pretty death, but it was not unexpected either.

Why?

Because for two weeks, strange and not-marvelous things had been happening.  My email wouldn’t send, the computer would shut down and lock down.  It was acting “possessed,” and so it turns out, it was.

A hacker somewhere in the world decided that mine would be a great computer to take out.  Why mine?  Probably because it was there, and for some reason, it seemed vulnerable.

The hacker knew how to “get in” and began corrupting everything so that what once worked and was wonderful, suddenly became frustrating and unworkable.  My relationships with others were affected.  I couldn’t respond to them when they sent me messages.  And I was apparently sending messages that I didn’t mean to send to people I didn’t even know.

The corruption of the system started affecting other things in “real life” as well.  Like I completely missed a meeting for Sunday School because I didn’t get the email message, and a whole swatch of stuff I really needed to make a fundraiser get started flawlessly went down with the ship.

Now, I’m not telling you this for sympathy.  I want to use it to illustrate what we’ve been talking about — what happened in the Garden of Eden in the fall and the resulting “fallen mind.”

For a minute, let’s pretend that our lives with God are the operating system on my CPU computer.

At first, everything was great.  We were hanging out in the Garden, messages were coming in and going out, programs were working, everything was WONDERFUL.

Then, something happened.

A hacker came in.  That hacker’s name was Satan.

Satan wormed his way into our operating system (not God’s, ours).  And he corrupted the files.  He reprogrammed things so that they didn’t work the way they had before.

Suddenly our harmonious operating system was giving error messages and shutting down for no reason, and we realized that “Something is WRONG!”

Now here’s where we really went off-track.

You see, in my computer shut down, one thing I have learned is that I don’t know much about fixing computers!  Oh, I know how to operate certain programs, and I do really good with those.  But if something happens to the computer itself or to a program (even if I am familiar with that program), I’m sunk.

I need an expert!

In the last month, I have talked with multiple experts at multiple companies.  One diagnosed the problem.  One restored and tried to fix the problem.  One put security software on that was supposed to fix it.  After the computer died, I had a new expert build a new computer.  Then I got to talk with a new expert because a program I used a lot was no longer working.  That last expert worked with me for three hours on three separate calls for us to finally find a 3-minute solution from the engineers of the program!

That’s right.  I went 4 layers up in the hierarchy of the company’s IT department trying to get one program to work!

But right there is where Adam and Eve went wrong (and where we do as well).  They didn’t go to the IT guy (God… the Creator).  They hid and tried to fix the problem on their own.

They realized something wasn’t right.  They knew the system had been corrupted, and they blamed themselves.

It was rather funny because in one call, after we’d been on the phone for about an hour and a half with no luck fixing the issue.  I started laughing. I told my new best friend (the current IT guy) that it made me feel much better because I thought it was me.  I thought I was too stupid to fix the thing.  He said (and I quote), “No, this wasn’t you. It’s something that’s wrong with the program.  You couldn’t have fixed this on your own.”

That was comforting to me because in my “blindness,” I was totally blaming myself for not knowing how to just fix it. That would have been comforting to Adam and Eve as well.  ”It’s not you.  You are not defective and worthless.  Something got inside you that corrupted everything, and you can’t fix it on your own.”  And something tells me, God would then have worked as long as it took (because HE DID!) with them to fix it.

In fact, in one of my early dealings with an IT guy, it was so funny…  He took “remote access” to my computer.  That means he could see my screen and move my mouse and everything.  Yes, it was a little freaky.

Well, he had gone off to do a little research on something so right quick before he came back, I was going to shut down some of the programs I had going.  I shut down about four of them and heard the phone click, so I knew he was back.  I didn’t get the little window he was working on pulled back up quickly enough, and he “caught me.”

Now this gentleman was from India and in his thick Indian accent, he started saying, “Ma’am! Ma’am!  Let me run the mouse!  Don’t touch the mouse!”  HAHHAA! I promise I hadn’t messed anything up, but isn’t that just like us?

God’s not fixing things fast enough, so when He “turns His head for a minute,” we figure, “I’ll just hide a few of these things so He doesn’t notice…”

And it’s incredible how hard it is to let go of the control of your “operating system.”

So basically, your life operating system has been corrupted, not just by Adam and Eve’s choice but by the choices you are making every day, and YOU CAN”T FIX IT ON YOUR OWN.

The question then is… can this operating system be fixed at all, or are we doomed to go through life sending messages we’re not meaning to send, frustrated because “programs” don’t work the way we want them to, but trying to fix it ourselves even though we suspect that we really can’t?

All good questions!  Stay tuned for more!