This morning I had an instructional “conversation” with my husband regarding the use of bookmarks, URLs, and deleted emails. Let’s just say I am not a patient teacher when it comes to showing others how to navigate the world of electronic communication, especially when the student does not have any desire to understand the basic mechanics.
Over the years, I have repeated this phrase hundreds of times: the computer will only do what you tell it to do. I’ve had co-workers, friends, and acquaintances lament to me that their computer is different. Their computer is frozen, messed up, stupid, corrupted, or whatever, and it happened all by itself. Uh . . . no. At least, the answer is no 99.99% of the time. There isn’t any amount of blame-laying that will change that fact. Again, the computer will only do what you tell it to do. You just have to learn the rules.
I got to thinking about how this applies to life.
We like to blame someone or something else when life doesn’t work the way we want it to work, because it couldn’t be our own fault, right? Things went wrong because someone or something else messed it up, froze our attempts, corrupted our ideas, or whatever, and it just happened. Uh . . . no. We have to learn the rules. Or in the case of us Christians, we have to learn what the rule Book says.
We have the ultimate instruction manual – the Bible – and we have God, the Father, speaking to us by His Holy Spirit. All. The. Time. But what do we do with that? We often don’t pay attention or ask for clarification or allow the words to sink into our hearts. We think we know better, but seriously, we don’t.
Like computers, we can only do what we – WE – tell ourselves to do.
Where are we getting our information? Are we listening to the right Source? Do we allow His words to root themselves in our spirits?
What will you do?
Inside the Writer 