Those moments when we gaze up and wonder why.

Oof, you lost a lot of progress. That's a deep frustration, a real punch in the gut.

Adminisk8or

12/04/2022

And onto Decmeber! The Christmas month! And yet, howbeit I've only put on my Christmas playlist like 3 times since Thanksgiving? Ah well.

It was no quiet week for me. There was, and still is much to do for myself at work. Monday was no small example of that when I spent almost 14 hours working, and had to drive through a bad snowstorm several times in the same day. In one of my visits that day, I spent an hour replacing a keyboard on a laptop- a job that on most systms takes about 5 minutes. But of course Dell, with their Latiutude 5520's has to be special.

On Friday at work, my coworker, who is in our office staff financial department came to me, asking if there was any chance to recover an Excel spreadsheet that crashed. I came in and worked my magic, but my magic wasn't enough- sadly, the sheet was unrecoverable. After telling him this, I saw that unmistakable crestfallen look on his face. Cringing a little, I asked, "how far back does that put you?" "Four hours," was his reply. There was little I could do to console him, but after walking away and reflecting, I remembered a time not all so long ago in which I was working on a homework assignment for a coding/scripting class. This assignment had us use a number of loops and arrays in a bash script to make some sort of output happen- I don't exactly recall, it was almost three years ago (weird). But I can't forget the moment I made a blunder.

If any of you have ever even really dipped your toes into the Linux world at all, you might know that deleting something on a forgiving system like Windows or MacOS is not the same thing as deleting something from the command line on linux. Once you run that "rm MyFileName.txt", it is gone into the void forever. As you might already be guessing, there I was coding that January day, and had created a dummy file of a similar name. I accidentally deleted the real one. And as you may well guess, yes, I had almost completely finished the script. Like my coworker, there I was, with probably about 4 or so hours of my work, gone.

Now, the good news for me was that I was able to remember most of it, and restore it even a little better than I had it before in the course of, I think an hour. But make no mistake, the moment I ran that delete command, and realized what I had done, I was momentarily inconsolable. In fact, to put it into perhaps a more fitting perspective, if you've ever played Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, you probably have a good understanding of what I felt. In that moment, it felt like I had reached the snake, and by running that delete command, had accidentally ridden it.

Maybe it sounds a little contrived, or like I'm reaching to hard, here, but I think there is a deep moment to be found here. It might sound a little shallow to say, in terms of playing Getting Over It, that when those moments happen, it's life altering and soul changing- but when devastating moments like that happen in real life, it is these moments we sometimes cast our eyes up to heaven and ask why. I know the age-old question has been asked time after time- why would a loving God let bad things happen, and I don't think trying to answer that here would help those who feel like they haven't had the chance to really explore that answer, rather than hearing what everyone else has to say. Believe me, if I thought it would help, I would go on for a whole short story's worth of why.

But I think the answer to such a question is not meant to just be given on a plate, with a knife, fork and napkin. If you feel like either you haven't found the answer to that question, or if you feel like the answer is simply that there couldn't be a God, period, I would suggest this is perhaps the perfect time of year to begin a quest within yourself. If your experience is anything like mine, you will not receive a easy, fast, or even complete answer. Such an important end goal should not come so easily. As such, answers and knowledge come in small packages- here a little, and there a little.

What I am about to share is a little personal, but I think it's appropriate in this context. It was June 13th of 2021; at this time, my parents had just recently divorced, and while I had anger in several directions, I found one of my inner cannons pointed right at my Grandfather. Without sharing more than is appropriate, I came to find myself blaming him for having raised my father in such an abusive and angry manner. At this time, (and at the time of writing, still), he is in a veteran's retirement home, still surviving in his old age. Perhaps part of my anger was that I felt like the person I had known my Grandfather to be, growing up, was now contrasted by this very different person I knew- and I felt betrayed, like the good grandpa I knew was a facade, and a means to cover his past sins. My wife and I went to a worship service in the area that day, and it was around this week- and even that very day, when this anger seemed to be growing and festering in my heart. But as we were put into a small group, with a few folks who were ministering to our group, the question came up of where everyone was from. A few mentioned they were from the neighboring county, in a rather remote community, and I remarked how I had been to that place, myself. This led to me mentioning that my grandfather used to live in that general area, himself, and then something surprising happened. One of the ministers there mentioned he was from that area, and knew my grandparents. He recounted how he always remembered when kids would come to their place, he'd always have candy for them, and was just a nice, old guy.

Perhaps, though, in a more surprising twist, I found myself thinking- wait, was that like an answer to my angry questions? I had been hoping that, if an answer was to come, it would be some big moment, where I realized "oh, that's why". But here, all I could do was continue our worship service, and ponder on this. The fact that he was nice to neighborhood kids surely didn't negate the tyrant he had been as a younger man, right? If I'm being honest, it's a question I still haven't fully answered for myself. I have a lot of questions that remain unanswered, but that moment was enough for me to consider that perhaps I was holding on to past anger that had already been lost in the ages. Whether that was something that just naturally disappeared, or if it was a series of repentant feelings is none of my business- all I know, and have come to learn, is that, even if it did me any good, I cannot hold that anger over an old man who is no longer the man he once was.

So, I share that example, hopefully as nothing to personal, as a viewpoint that not all questions are answered so quickly. It took me months to find that kind of answer, and even than, as you can see, it's only just enough of an answer to go by. And that's not to say everyone has the same experiences, right? You might well find your journey is very much different than mine, and the path you take would be one you very much didn't initially expect. But when you find a good and right thing, my advice is to follow it, and don't give up.

In the meantime, I just got a piano for free! It needs one mean tuning up, and the bench feels like it'll collapse if you look at it the wrong way, but I can't express how excited I am to finally own a piano! I would even go so far as to say it was worth the cost of making my twisted back ache for days on end after moving it, haha.

But until next time, see ya!