Yesterday I saw that one of my favorite readers, Jennie, had a case of the dreaded hard drive failure. My sympathy goes out to her, and to anyone else who has experienced this rude realization that digital life is fragile.
Her struggle reminded me of a similar occasion I experienced. I’m writing it down so that it gets written down – but you can read it too.
A few years ago, I was working on a very important project. This particular project was worth many thousands of dollars to me and my family. I was at work the night before deadline, trying to get everything wrapped up so that I could get it submitted the next morning. I remember that it was after midnight, and I wanted to get finished and get to bed.
Then it happened: My Mac turned itself off. I wasn’t too worried, because I have developed a “save reflex” and save the files I am working on frequently, without even thinking about it. I chose to develop this skill, rather than throw myself off a bridge. I had been burned before.
I restarted the Mac, and waited for it to boot up. Chime…wait..screen…wait…desktop…good to go. Only this time, after the start-up chime, the normal process was interrupted by this:
I have affectionately learned to call this the “Blinking Folder of Doom”. Not to be confused with the “Blue Screen of Death”. While the “Blue Screen of Death” means the system is dead, the “Blinking Folder of Doom” means that your computer does not see your hard drive – which usually means the hard drive is dead. Dead, as in everything on that drive is now unaccessible.
So I restarted the computer. Again. And again. And again. Nothing.
I began to sweat.
I found my system disks and ran a disk utility program. Nothing.
I began to get nauseous.
I ran a third-party disk repair program. Nothing.
I called my EC at 1:00am, explained the problem, and told her I would be late.
I restarted the computer 20 more times.
I got angry at the computer.
I got angry at myself for not having backed up. At all.
I cussed. Out loud.
I started the computer 20 more times. Aggressively.
I tried to figure out if I had time to recreate all the work to meet my deadline. Impossible.
I noticed that it was now 3:00am, and I again fought the urge to vomit.
It shames me to confess that up until this time it had not occurred to me to ask for God’s help. But I was quickly becoming very humble. So, I did what I should have done hours earlier. I prayed. I repented. I asked for help.
“Heavenly Farther it is important to me and my family that I can save this hard drive. It is a righteous desire. I need a miracle. Please help me. Please fix my hard drive.”
I stood up, and with complete faith I pushed the startup button. I heard the chime, the screen flickered for a moment, and there before me was…the Blinking Folder of Doom. Still.
I was not pleased. It was a righteous desire, right? Was I really asking that much? He created the universe, right? But I knew that my heart wasn’t right. I was angry, and I was giving God my order like He worked at a drive-thru repair shop. My “humility” was forced.
So, I sat and thought. And eventually I prayed again. It was a very different prayer, I was no longer angrily desperate, merely desperate. I no longer expected, merely hoped. I knew God had the power to help me, but I didn’t know if He should. This time I was more specific. This time I asked the Lord to help me know what to do to solve the problem.
At 3:30am, I got up from my knees and pushed the startup button yet another time. I heard the chime…and the hard drive spun up. Everything loaded on the screen – it was all there! I quickly transferred all the important files off my computer, onto an external hard drive. Seconds after the transfer was complete, the system crashed again, and that hard drive never worked again.
God did not repair my hard drive – but He gave me 3 minutes. 180 seconds. It was enough.
I tearfully returned to my knees, stunned with gratitude. I plugged the hard drive into another computer, finished my project, met my deadline, and went home as the sun was coming up.
Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise. Alma 37:6
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
Discover more from Thus We See...
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Now that the Lord saved you in your time of need, show your gratitude to him by making it unnecessary to have to go back and ask him for the same thing sometime down the road. All of my files are now saved to dropbox. Not only does it sync almost instantaneously, but I can easily retrieve my files from my phone, my tablet or any internet enabled computer. There are many choices other than Dropbox. Do yourself a favor and set it up asap.
Hmmm…I really needed to read this story. The whole “forced humility” thing- I’m really good at that. It is hard to have a really powerful prayer when you just finished yelling at your kids for losing your keys….and it is hard to hear any promptings.
I love your blog. It is such a great mix of humor and wisdom. Elder Scott says that a sense of humor can help being in tune with the Spirit. I find that true here!
Great story. Prayer is such a gift.
Sorry, I’ve been waiting for the right forum to tell that joke. Maybe there isn’t one.
MMM,
I had a very similar experience. My hard drive crashed. It had all kinds of irreplaceable family photos and original music compositions. My hometeacher is a techie. I took it to him. The hard drive was from a PC and was removable. We tried the freezer trick. Didn’t work. I prayed hard and had the feeling to heat up the hard drive. We put it on top of another running hard drive until it heated up and then it miraculously booted up long enough to pull off the data. God truly does answer prayers, and we should all follow the example of the savior, because “Jesus saves.”
Groan.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Very empowering. 🙂
I needed this today. Thanks!!
Yor blog is AWESOME, love it so much! I’m also a mormon (from Finland) 🙂 happy summer to you!
xoxo
Susanna
http://susanna-behindmyeyes.blogspot.com
Thanks Susanna! Finland is awesome. It is one of the countries I have always wanted to visit. I have a bunch of readers from there. I’ll come check out your blog.
Awesome story!! Next time do your work on an I-pad though. I accidentally threw away my phone… with my grandson’s birth pictures on it. Devastated to put it mildly. When I bought my new phone they were able to restore all the pictures because of some “cloud”? I had prayed and prayed to find that phone but the tracker in it showed it was at the dump. So I bought the new phone and the “cloud” gave all those memories back to me. I think Heavenly Father is a techie.
I just spent 1 1/2 hours copying my files and pictures. This is the 2nd story I read about people losing their family pictures so I decided that I would take that as a warning and copy them. Hopefully it’s just me being prudent and not inspiration before my computer crashes. But it has been acting funky.
Jennie sounds like a super amazing person. I heard she’s still waiting on her miracle. And she promises to back up her computer every Fast Sunday.
Yeah, I’ve never met her, but I understand she is unbelievably amazing, talented, attractive, blah, blah.
My EC’s external hard drive with her professional and our family photos crashed. She prayed and we were able to recover the files. The went back to not working. I wish I would stop being so surprised by the power of God.
Great story. I think a lot of times when I ask for similiar type things, although probably not as critical as yours was, deep down I don’t think God will help me. I think I need to work on having more faith.
Thank you once again for another wonderful article. It is a wise man who can see the need to change himself before he asks the Lord to help him change his circumstances.
Ooooo, this story have me goosebumps. I love hearing about how loved we are. What a wonderful Father we have. But kudos to you for recognizing the need for a sincerely humble prayer, and knowing what to ask. That’s why we all like you, Bacon Man.
Mind if I share one? We were driving through a mountainous pass during a blizzard. My brothers and sister and I were in the back and we could tell that our dad was nervous. My sister said a prayer out loud that we’d be safe and within a minute my dad saw a semi truck in front of him. He followed this semi truck until we were out of the blizzard (it was very slow) and then when the weather cleared, we passed the semi. In front of the semi truck, unbeknownst to us until we passed it, was a snowplow. Pretty cool.
What a deeply profound experience. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Awesome story. We are all beggars before God.
(And I can really relate — I’ve replace a desktop and a laptop at my house in the last month. We backed up the laptop to an external drive; we were not so lucky with the desktop…)
Awesome! My daughter one time prayed in perfect faith that her CTR ring would be found among the millions of wood chips surrounding the local park equipment. Not only was it found but it was found by a teacher from her school who recognized it and knew it was hers. Sometimes being the only CTR wearing child in a community has its advantages. It brought me shame that I had tried to let her down easy by telling her after she prayed that sometimes the Lord does not answer our prayers in the way we would hope for them to be answered. Perfect faith as a little child is something we should all strive for in our daily lives.
I love how Heavenly Father is so interested in even the tiniest, minutest portions of our lives that He still has us go through the “process” to receive the blessings that He is more than happy to give us. I loved your story. Thank you for sharing!
I love ‘answers to prayers’ stories. I never cease to be amazed.
AWESOME! The Lord really does care about the things that are important to us. Thank you for sharing this today. 🙂
Wow!! I can’t even imagine. Thanks for sharing!
What a powerful reminder of the power of sincere, humble prayer – and the importance of back up (which I need to learn how to do)