C is for COMPUTER

I knew immediately that there was a problem. I had been warned that if it occurred, it was probably the worst thing that could happen. Everything had looked perfectly normal the night before but this particular morning, when I switched on the power, all I could see was the dreaded blue screen. Not the normal light blue colour that sometimes you might associate with a desktop but a deep blue accompanied with a message that I didn’t want to read and telling me what I didn’t want to know. My computer was knackered.The first time it happened, I didn’t know what to do, but I knew it was bad news and even though, after a series of phone calls and help from friends, I managed to get the thing going again, it was never the same and it didn’t live happily ever after. Indeed I found myself filled with an air of trepidation every time I turned it on, hoping that the blue screen wouldn’t reappear but unfortunately. From time to time, it did and I was again left floundering as to what to do. It’s funny, but it almost always seems to happen in the middle of a big project. A few years ago, I was editing film for a DVD of my son’s school rugby team when the screen turned blue, then last Christmas all my PowerPoint presentations and slide shows for the school play suffered the same fate, only three days before the opening night and the final straw came just less than a year ago, when the dreaded colour returned to haunt me just as we started to record youngest son’s first album of songs. Now I know part of the problem is my fault because, like most people, I try to push the computer to work too hard and to try and do things that it just wasn’t made to do. Whether it’s too little ROM or lack of RAM or the processor’s too slow or the software has some bugs or I’m just too impatient or a virus has crept in, but generally it’s usually partly my fault for the way I treat it. So last year, in the midst of my gloom, I went and bought an all singing-all dancing computer with lots of RAM, a huge hard drive, an external hard drive and a very fast processor and made a vow to myself that I would look after it, which, almost a year later, I have managed to do. Now it is only used for selected jobs, such as audio and video recording and will not, I repeat, will not be connected to the internet.My old computer was reformatted by a friend and has worked fine ever since but it’s purely my internet browser and of course, my blog interface.

I remember, somewhere in the early eighties there was a little computer called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum that you could plug into your television and mainly use for playing games and the first computer that arrived in the school where I taught at the time consisted of a huge black box and a monitor, that had a green display. There was a disc drive that took very floppy discs which were slightly larger than CD cases, but no mouse, so all instructions had to be typed in. This was followed by BBC computers, that also accepted the oversized discs, had a cream coloured keyboard and a very cube like monitor which displayed white type on a black screen. At least this was a step forward, for coloured programs became available and added some interest rather than just typing in numbers and letters, but it was still pretty basic. Imagine our delight then when Apple produced their first computer that actually worked using a mouse. It was the size of a medium hi-fi speaker and had the screen built in. Now you could type on the screen without having to go through a whole set of instructions and print your work out. When I moved schools, I bought an Applemac and for the next seven or eight years it did everything asked it to do and never broke down once, but it’s memory was so small that I knew sooner or later, a change was inevitable. Strangely, around the same time, we also bought some in Applemacs in school and even more strangely, I still use one of them every day, fifteen years later, for simple word processing and making my class notes and they just don’t give problems.So what did we do before computers came along? I guess we had to write everything down or use a bulky typewriter, had to listen to music on CD players, send films off for developing, keep accounts in books, view photos in albums, visit banks and travel agents, send letters and actually wait for news on the radio or television. Yes, computers have changed our lives and you wonder how you did without them sometimes.

When Jesus came into the world as a baby, He came with one mission and that was to change our spiritual lives and the way we approached God for ever. The Old Testament is filled with examples of laws, rituals and sacrifices that the people were required to comply with in order to worship their God and seek repentance. Jesus did away with all of that when he died and rose again for He had become the only sacrifice for our sins that was needed and now we can approach our God through His Son and once again call Him Father. Remember that famous verse in Corinthians 'Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.' Once you experience the joy He brings to your life, there is no going back for He gives us grace to live each day. My latest computer is already out of date, such are the advances in technology and will probably stop working some of these days. However it's satisfying to know that the God who existed long before the microchip never lets me down and is all I need for the future. Process that!