Unthankful: 0 Files Found by Bob Jones

 Photo by Ato Aikins on Unsplash

 

Have you ever transferred computer files from one server to another? It should be simple, right? You move the files. You check that everything arrived. You move on.

At least, that's what I thought.

For more than a year, I had been piecing together a book. I had collected quotes from books I was reading, sections from sermons I had preached, and stories about people who had inspired me. Slowly, the pieces were beginning to form something I cared about.

The title was going to be Believe Well, Live Well: The Essential Faithful Life.

The premise was simple: learning to believe what is true is essential to learning to live faithfully. What we believe about God, ourselves, other people, suffering, truth, and the future inevitably shapes the way we live.

Then our organization changed servers.

An IT technician was assigned to transfer the files of our staff, including mine. The process was completed, and I thought nothing more about it.

Until a few weeks later. I went looking for the file containing my book.

It wasn't there.

I searched again.

Nothing.

I searched all my files by the title.

Zero files found.

The technician did his own search.

Same result.

I felt sick.

Eventually, we discovered that a segment of my files had never transferred.

The technician was as mystified as I was. "This doesn't make sense. I don't know what happened to your files."

The files were gone.

So was a year of work.

This happened more than thirty years ago,

but I can still remember the feeling of despair. My colleagues encouraged me to reconstruct the manuscript from memory, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I didn't have the heart for it.

I couldn't get my head around trying to recreate something that had taken me more than a year to assemble. I wanted the manuscript back. And when I couldn't have it back, I gradually convinced myself that perhaps it didn't matter.

My own worst enemy of an inner voice began whispering:

The book probably wouldn't have been very good anyway. Maybe it's just as well the file disappeared.

And my busy schedule provided a convenient excuse to move on.

Looking back, there is an irony I completely missed at the time.

The book was called Believe Well, Live Well. And I certainly wasn't believing well.

The writing prompt for this month brought that memory back to me:

"Share a story of when you found it difficult to give

thanks in your writing life. What did God teach you

through that experience?"

I wasn't thankful thirty years ago. And, honestly, I'm not particularly thankful for losing the manuscript today. But I am thankful for this writers' group.

I'm thankful for a writing prompt that reached back three decades and pulled an unfinished story back into the light.

And perhaps I'm beginning to understand what God might have been teaching me.

I still believe the premise of that long-lost book:

Believing well doesn't mean believing that everything

will go well. It means believing what is true

even when things don't go well.

Maybe the book wasn't lost after all.

Maybe only the first draft was.

Have you ever lost a manuscript? A file? Or simply the motivation to continue something you once believed was worth doing?

Maybe it's time to begin again.

 

Thank you for reading.