Lesson Learned

I think that one of the main ways that God teaches us is through life experiences. Romans talks about how trials produce perseverance and perseverance produces character. We grow and learn through each experience in our lives. The frustrating part is that I feel like I never fully learn the lesson. I go through an experience and God comes through in an incredible way, but a few months down the road I have forgotten and He has to teach me again. This is exactly what happened to me today.

Almost two weeks ago my laptop crashed. I realized that I had not backed up some of the information in about six months, the more important information was backed up about a month ago. I was going to loose pictures and important ministry information that I had spent hours working on. I immediately took this problem into my hands to fix it. I tried everything I could to get the computer to turn on again, even taking out the hard drive and putting it into another laptop. The second laptop could not boot anything off of the hard drive; it was completely dead. Every day for almost two weeks I would open up the computer and push the power button hoping that it would turn on, but it didn't. It was done.

Family members and friends said that they were praying for my laptop and I was very thankful for that. I knew that God could fix it, but for some reason I never prayed for Him to fix it. After I exhausted every option that I knew of and concluded that there was no hope, I realized that I should pray for my computer. So after two weeks of doing everything I could do, I started to pray. I would turn it on and nothing would happen. I prayed again and turned it on. Again, nothing. I did this for maybe an hour until finally the laptop turned on. Everything opened correctly and I was able to pull everything off of the hard drive. I called my parents to share what God had done. My mom asked when it had finally turned on and I said about 5 minutes before. She said that 5 minutes before I called, she was praying for me with my dad and a friend of theirs. I was completely blown away! God heard our prayers about a laptop and answered in an incredible way!

It seems like many times God waits untill the absolute last moment when we give up all hope before he decides to act. It is almost his way of showing us that we didn't do it, but it was all Him. This has happened so many times in my life. Every time I have a problem I always try to fix it first, and when my way doesn't work I start to pray. I hope that I do not need to be taught this lesson again in the future, but that I will turn to God in prayer as my first solution and not my last. He not only cares about me, but he also cares about the little things like my laptop. How cool is that?!