Protecting me from myself

I just have to share this bit of wonderful news. I have been so incredibly blessed by the Lord. What a mysterious way He has moved.

In early 2004, I purchased an internal 120GB hard drive. I also purchased a device that allowed me to plug it into any computer (called a Firewire bridge), turning it into an external hard drive. I started backing up my most important files to it, which usually included my emails and IM conversations.

In May of the same year, while in Iowa, it started acting funny. Eventually, it stopped working altogether. I figured it was the hard drive going bad, which was very disappointing to me. Right around this time, I involved myself with a girl and made the decision that the best thing for me to do was to completely erase everything about my past and sever any history of any ties with many of my old good friends rather than deal with my relationships honestly (especially the current one!). So, I deleted all my emails and IM logs, particularly from the young women with whom I formed honestly good friendships in which there wasn’t ever a romance.

One of those girls was Rosanna Storey. You may have heard of her.

After this relationship ended, I had to repair the damage I had caused by the unfair (and in some cases dishonest) way I told some friends I was in that new relationship. Thank God my friends were all gracious to me and understood why I did what I did, and forgave me in the instances where I was overly zealous (i.e., untruthful and harsh) in doing so. Rosanna and I started talking consistently again on January 11th, 2005. God brought to light a lot of things I wouldn’t allow myself to think concerning Rosanna because of wrong thinking I had about myself in relation to God. Soon, I re-discovered the unity she and I had, but this time God granted romance to enter in. On January 21st, 2005, I made my feelings known to her. And, as previously noted, she accepted my proposal of marriage on October 7th, 2005.

Throughout last year (and I want to write an entry about 2005. It’s worth an entry, man), Rosanna and I reminisced about our first conversations back in 2003 when we were completely just friends. She started saving some of our IM conversations (that was the way we communicated for the most part. We did meet in March of ‘04), but obviously she didn’t save our first few. I use Adium, which automatically saves all conversations and even allows you to search them by content. I would have still had our conversations but for the crusade I went on in June of ‘04. More than anything I regretted being so untrue to myself to destroy all old conversations, but Rosanna understood and admired me for doing it, in a way. Nevertheless, I was intensely sad that our conversations were gone. We could recall a few of the details regarding them, though, and that was special. I knew it was my own doing, which intensified the pain. What a treasure it would have been to have those!

So, I had some concerns throughout last year that my hard drives needed to be backed up. I figured since my external hard drive was out of commission I should just buy another one. I tried several times last year to get my hands on some cheap hard drives just to see whether it was the 120GB hard drive that failed or the Firewire bridge. Nothing ever worked out, ‘till last month where I found a 160GB HD for $60 which I promptly picked up. After plugging everything in… it acted the same way my other hard drive acted! I knew it was probably the Firewire bridge, not the hard drive, that was damaged. I took apart my iMac DV SE and installed my old 120GB hard drive on it, and lo and behold, the sucker booted up!

Heretofore I had only thought that I had a few installer back-ups on this hard drive. So, I purchased a couple of new Firewire bridges off eBay and waited patiently for them to arrive.

Yesterday, they arrived. Rosanna and I were talking on the phone last night (a frequent occurrence) as I was putting the hard drives into their new cases to make doubly sure they worked. I plugged in the 120GB hard drive and… it booted and worked perfectly! That was good news already. And then…

…I saw a folder called “Adium 2.0” on the root level of the hard drive.

“Oh my God,” I prayed out loud. His Providence clicked instantaneously and I could not doubt His hand for an instant. I knew it was Him.

Rosanna was puzzled as to why I nearly started crying and kept praising the goodness of God. I dove into the folder and found… all of the logs up until May ‘05, when we stopped talking. God had preserved the most precious communications between us, our very first conversations, by allowing my first Firewire bridge to fry (which, at the time, severely disappointed me). At the time I probably doubted His goodness in allowing this to happen. But little did I know what He was doing.

The bottom line to this entry is: had the hard drive continued to work, I would have found the backup of Rosanna and my conversations and purged them during my crusade. Like God protecting many Egyptians and Jacob’s family through the evil of Joseph’s brother selling him into slavery, God allowed my hard drive to be inoperable (by not stopping whatever it was that fried it) in order to preserve data that I would consider more valuable than gold, but at the time would have destroyed because of fear. How many couples get the privilege of looking at their very first conversations as if it were a movie?

What had I named this hard drive back in early 2004? 40 Acres ( lyrics | song ), the name of an album and song by Caedmon’s Call. The chorus is:

There’s 40 acres and redemption to be found
Just along down the way
There is a place where no plow blade has turned the ground
And you will turn it over, ‘cause out here hope remains
‘Cause out here hope remains…

How prophetic. This is just yet another instance of God’s free and amazing grace being lavishly poured out upon us. I don’t deserve this… but I accept it with all my heart filled with praise.

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. (Genesis 50:20)

“That many conversations should be kept alive, as they are today.” We have a treasure to point to the goodness of God for our children and grandchildren. We can show them the first time we talked! And we can tell them of God’s mercy in how He used a faulty Firewire bridge to bring about a mercy so precious as this.

If God can use a burned out Firewire bridge to bring about such an intense blessing, why should I doubt Him on other things whose ends I cannot see?