Ryan's Journal

If you only read this at work, you should close the browser and go back to work. Or else hit more and look back at this weekend's entry. Especially if you're coming from kerberos.authentica.com. Anyways. Today was an interesting day. My loyal laptop - it never leaves my side - daddy.mit.edu, has lost its hard drive to some incurable disease, at least by my physician's skills (either the controller or the actual hard drive is dead, and I can't fix that). Let this be an important lesson: backup anything that's important, because the primary copy will die one day. My thesis-relevant files are under version control in one location, and I've checked out a backup copy just now for a backup of the backup. I've lost at most a couple days worth of work, which is significant but not worrisome. All of the software environment was on the laptop too, but I think it can be replicated in another place quickly enough.

Isn't God good? I mean, looking at today's sermon notes (to follow), I just have to let go the things I've invested in and made too important. They could go at anytime. God's in ultimate control of things. Certainly doing my work is good and biblical, but the work of our hands is under the Creator of the universe's hands, too. So I'm going to finish this thesis, laptop or no - because God's in charge, and I don't have to have my own little machine to see things through. Cze's offered me the use of her TiBook for the next couple of weeks, so we'll see if that kind of operation will work.

Sermon notes from today at High Rock. The children's ministry pastor Dan Waite spoke from Haggai 1:2-15, 2:3-9. Haggai is giving two messages. In the first, he speaks about priorities - it's a simple message, there's nothing complex to dig into. God's temple wasn't being rebuilt by his people even though they'd been there for sixty years, and they had eventually turned to trying to improve their own lives and satisfy their perceived need for more resources before they could return to something 'extra' like a temple. But they weren't succeeding, they weren't fulfilled in their pursuits. Despite their hard work, their crops were failing and they were still low on physical resources. God was withholding blessing because they were putting the wrong things first. As they returned to building the temple, they were discouraged because it was so much poorer than the first one. Haggai was given another message, telling them not to be discouraged by their own judgments of their current temple work, because they were doing what He wanted and He would be the one to glorify His temple and their desire for His presence, their work, despite its appearance.

We're often out trying to build our own lives, out of a need for security and a need for significance. It is pragmatic to know that hard work and studying will pay off where laziness won't, that putting your all into something means it will probably be recognized moreso than letting it slide. Yet those are often our own goals, the lives we're trying to build for ourselves. We must put our own priorities straight and realize we don't need everything we think we do - and all we really need is God's presence. We must realize that the work of our hands may never live up to what we expect greatness to look like, but if the work is God's work, it will be His glory and His greatness coming out as He uses us.

Good timing. So what are our plans for our lives? How much of them, and how much of our lives right now are we looking to build for own security, our own significance? That one's kind of personal for this forum. Answer it if you will in public, but try answering it.

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