Wow, I get my desk together and think I’m on a roll when all of a sudden, my computer goes on the fritz and my life is turned upside down!  Have you ever lost a hard drive or done like I did a couple of months ago and dropped your smart phone into the toilet?  If you have ever done either, you will immediately be able to relate to the horror I felt when I was told I needed to reformat my hard drive.

When Jim told me of my fate, I immediately thought, what do I have that I need to keep and what can I lose that won’t matter anyway.  Perhaps half of what I have on my hard drive could be lost and I would never know it was gone.  However, my mind went to the recent book I’ve been writing,  my real estate files, pictures, contacts, old emails and other important things that made me cringe at the thought of losing and having to start over.  How could I ever rebuild all of those things?  I had spent hours editing, scanning, and creating a LOT of stuff!

After thinking all of my contacts were lost forever, Jim announced he found them on an old backup and the day was saved!  Whew.  I like to live on the edge sometimes, but even that scare was too much for me!   My comment to Jim when he found them was, “Wow, I thought for a minute I had lost my entire life on that hard drive!”

Some day when God calls me home to heaven, I won’t have my hard drive or phone to take with me.  I laughingly can imagine some people standing at the pearly gates and saying, “Really?  I can’t take my cell phone?  Do you know what that means to me?”

Then I was convicted.  I can have 100’s of Facebook contacts,  followers and readers of my writings as well as my “tweets” in this life.  However, what good are they when I’m gone?  What would happen if God came today and deleted all of these people from my life, leaving only He and I.  Would I be content with that?  Sometimes in the mornings, I find myself checking Facebook before I read my devotion.  I’m often convicted that even in the small things…the innocent things…I need to put God first.

The fact is, some day everything that we have held dear in this lifetime will be gone…even those things we’ve backed-up a hundred times.  Only that which has been done for Jesus will remain.  As a matter of fact, He’s not impressed by my Facebook contacts at all.  More realistically, He put those people in my life for me to be a witness.  Have I reflected Him in my words, thoughts and actions?  If He comes through and deletes the earthly things I’ve clung to all of these years, would there be any evidence of my walk with Him?  Would lives be changed because of the time I spent talking with others about Jesus or will they just be saying, “Lori, who?”

Yes, I was traumatized by losing some data this past week.  You may have missed the fact that I didn’t blog last week…or then again…maybe you didn’t notice.  You see, the things we think are important in this life really aren’t all that important, especially to others.  I’ve heard it said, “What you did for someone in this life might not be remembered, but how you made them feel will be remembered.”

As a writer, I want to remembered as someone who affected the way you feel in order to affect your walk with God.  For as I am realizing the older I get, all of the other things of this world will quickly be deleted and what I have done for God will be the only data left.  What will your hard drive say about you when you’re gone?  Will there be anything there that will say, “He or she was a servant of God.”  Or will it just be empty…erased…deleted?

As a country that on every corner, in every restaurant and office, millions can be found huddled around a smart phone, my question would be.  Are we paying attention to the important things in life that will last for an eternity?  Or are we just allowing our data filled lives to suck us into a world that someday will be deleted?  The choice is ours.

So for today…I will remember that most of the data on my computer or phone is not all that important in the big scheme of things.  It is, for the most part, a collection of earthly stuff that when I am gone will have no meaning.  What I do with the tools such as my cell phone and computer, is what matters.  Do I use them for with eternity in mind or are they just a distraction from the things I should be doing?  Just as with anything in life, that which glorifies God will last, but what doesn’t will someday be deleted.  Gone forever.  Can you live with that?

P.S.  Don’t judge me if you see me huddled around my cell phone.  I am guilty of spending too much time on it and haven’t mastered the not wasting time on it so well yet.  God’s working on me with that one. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem!  Be blessed and don’t forget…get out there and be a blessing!

Matthew 6: 19-21 (NIV) ¹⁹ “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰ But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.