What a Praise!

This morning, I was about to prepare to send a really important email
when the power went out. My computer would not come back on. It would go
through memory count, keyboard and mouse recognition, and one more step
(that I can't recall at the moment, but it's not a big thing), and then
it just froze -- no hard drive noise, no beeps, only the whirring of the
fan.

My heart was shattered.

I went into the bathroom to take my shower and get to work, but I stood
in the doorway and cried for two minutes. I can't really afford to buy a
new computer, and I didn't know what it would take to get this running.
I poured my heart out to God about it. I felt calmly relieved after
doing that. Pouring one's heart out to God is a good thing; I think He
wants that reality from us.

I asked some people who know God pretty well to pray for my computer. I
prayed about it, too. When I got home from work, I prayed some more but
watched "Sledge Hammer" on DVD, then "Malcolm in the Middle", and did a
Gazelle workout. Then I prayed some more. I went to my computer in my
bedroom, sat down, prayed again, and pushed the power button. I hit
Escape so I could watch the startup sequence: memory, keyboard, mouse,
<that thing I can't remember>, then Norton Anti-Virus started up (which
I didn't see this morning), then a message about updating installed
software, then "Starting Windows 98" (yes, it's old -- sue me), and my
desktop came up. I sat here dumb-founded.

I was trying to figure out why I was so shocked it came up after all the
prayer that went into it. And I realized I wasn't shocked that it came
up; I was shocked at how relieved I was, all my thoughts of how to
manage this fiasco just went up in a puff of smoke, figuratively.

THANK YOU, GOD!!!

(2005-Jan-15: btw, this was sent to the mail-in posting on Tuesday, 2005-Jan-11, about 11:30pm and didn't show up until Friday morning. not sure if it's my ISP or blogger)