Last night my laptop got so confused. It couldn’t use its backup disk – I could point it to the backup, and mount the drive, and look at the files, but the poor little MacBookPro just couldn’t seem to understand. Finally, I had to reboot, let it forget some stuff and start over again. Then everything worked beautifully once more.
That’s rather like my relationship with God. I read articles, I follow blogs, I go to retreat days, I deal with people around me, things go good or bad with work or church or family. I get so many ideas going that they can get twisted up and very confusing.
Reboot.
Get quiet and let go of all of these things. Go back to the basics: go back to the relationship and start at the beginning, start at the heart. Listen to the words of Jesus in the scriptures. Listen to the prophets and the stories. Sit with the Lord and just be in the presence of God. Then and only then will the other stuff sort itself out and begin to make sense and begin to work properly once more.
The OS on a computer is like the foundation of faith. It relies on the hardware, but it controls the way that the hardware is used and what is can and will do. There are times when patches must be applied to correct some ways it works, or protect from evil entrusions. And very often, these patches won’t really take effect until the machine is rebooted – restarted clean.
When I have to reboot it’s a clean start with the basic assumptions in place. It might happen after reconciliation: wipe things clean, reload, restart with a cleared cache. It might happen just in prayer by myself. Or it might happen just after a great insight (there we go – patch the system and reboot).
This morning I had to reboot. Alleluia!