Just fix that and you’re good...a geek's simile to prayer

from patheos.com by Elizabeth Scalia

Was talking to an IT fellow about internet access-issues and the sorts of big-and-small server issues that are the everyday bane of those who make their living on the internets and he described a recent moment of angst:

It is SO incredibly frustrating when you try EVERYTHING you know and most things you barely understand to fix a problem and NONE of it works. Then of course someone else looks at it and goes – “Oh there’s a password in this file over here that we forgot to change yesterday, Just fix that and you’re good”

That’s analogous to the life of faith, and in particular the life of prayer that facilitates grace. Sometimes people get so caught up in the whirling dervishes of everything that is before their eyes, pounding their sensibilities in such non-stop and intrusive ways, that a person of faith can feel overrun by externals and blinded to simplicity; simple facts, simple truths, simple remedies that we could easily see and grasp on to, if we could just step back, take a breath, and let everything we know–all we’ve been taught–come to the fore.

We have all had the experience of going to sleep on a problem and waking up with a solution. But often and often when the mind is whirring away like a centrifuge–flinging away reason, clarity of thought and solutions–simply sitting back, taking a breath and slipping into the stillness of those prayers we memorized as children helps the centrifuge to slow; thought, reason and solutions collect again, in the center.

“Oh, right…the passwords, over in this file…just access the file…you’re good to go.”

Don’t forget the prayerful passwords uploaded into your memory by rote, all those years ago; they can still be downloaded, instantly, to meet all your servant/server needs.