Returning to my office after two weeks of vacation brought one incredibly unpleasant surprise. My Computer had overheated and the hard drive “fried.” All of my files that were saved on my work computer are gone. Thankfully, my doctoral work is saved to both home and work computers – I still have that! But twelve years of sermon notes and outlines, ten years of pastoral notes like this one – would you believe I have written you 127 of these notes. A dozen outlines of books I planned to write in retirement – some with completed chapters! All gone.
No doubt there are lessons to be learned – save to an external hard drive being one of them. For my part I am going to work exclusively in google docs now so that my work gets saved to the “cloud” – whatever that is…
Nonetheless, it is sad when you lose something you have worked hard on. Whether the loss was due to an honest mistake or oversight, an unforeseeable act of providence, or your own active stupidity. Loss is still sad.
In my pastoral work I often counsel folks who have lost parents, children, careers, marriages, friendships, opportunities, money, houses, pets… In some sense, loss is very much a part of all of our suffering on this side of heaven. The encroaching effects of the fall always take away – they add nothing worth having.
And when I counsel folks dealing with loss, I share with them a scripture that I am sharing with myself right now: “God will call the past to account!”
In Ecclesiastes chapter three, we are taught that there is a time for everything – including difficult things like tearing down, dying, and casting away. Furthermore, we are told that everything is beautiful in its time! The burden of being human on this side of heaven is described in verse eleven. We understand conceptually the way things ought to be, we understand in principle that God has made everything including fried hard drives beautiful in its time, but we struggle because we have no idea what God is up to: we “cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
You may rely upon it; God is always up to something.
And one day we will know what that something is! That’s where our title quote comes from. In verse fifteen we are assured that “God will call the past to account.” All of these things that we grieve and scratch our heads over will one day be recalled and seen in light of God’s grand design for magnifying his glory and multiplying our blessings.
For me that means I can look at twelve years of lost work, take a deep breath, and keep writing sermons, outlining future books, and typing out notes like this one.
What does it mean for you? What have you lost that you need to release, trusting that God will himself call that part of your past to account someday?
Your Pastor,
Bob Bjerkaas