An Answered Prayer!

Funny how there are certain things I pray about a lot, and certain things that I guess I just figure I can do on my own. Now, in my mind, I know that I should be praying about everything. I know that I depend on the Lord for the very air I breath. I should be praising him and thanking him for the fact that I'm sitting here on my bed, completely healthy, using my fingers to type, my brain to think, the electricity to power my internet, and his grace which just keeps the world spinning as it should so we don't all fly off into space!

And I know that I should also be praying for all of the little situations I find myself in every day. I should be praying for my work with the Ministry of Education every day and praying for his guidance on how to speak and who to speak to. I should be praying for safety on the roads when I go out (though I do often thank Him for protection and safety each time I venture out!). I should be praying for peace in this country. I do pray for those things, but I should be praying for those things a lot more, and I should be expecting to see Him to amazing miraculous things.

But in actual fact, my prayer life comes alive when it comes to these pesky computers that I work with! Honestly, I have never prayed so much over a bunch of "stuff" until I became a bit responsible for all this IT stuff down here! I can't tell you how many times I've been completely clueless about how to make a computer work again, or how to get the network and Internet going... and out of desperation, just prayed, because there was nothing left to do!

And it came to that again tonight. Actually, one of our "real" computer guys has come down for a few days from a different city, which is a blessing in and of itself! Especially because one of our key administrators dropped his laptop yesterday! Ooops. He completely killed it, though he did make a valiant effort to save it, even ending up on the floor himself in an effort to break the fall of the computer on the concrete!

Anyways, I couldn't do anything with it, though I did try to replace a hard drive. And tonight, the computer guy took a look at it, and he couldn't do anything with the old hard drive - it was dead, completely. Wouldn't spin, nothing. But no problem - Andy brought an extra hard drive and even a whole new computer with him, and Richard had backed his stuff up just last week, and his emails from the past week are still on the email server.

However, through a comedy of errors (rather unfortunate errors), the high tech super duper supposedly fool proof back up system that the computer geeks had set up for him hasn't actually been working since March! And the high tech super duper back up system is supposedly so automatic that it doesn't even tell the user whether or not the back up that he thought he was doing was successful or not.

So, you can imagine the trauma that goes along with realizing his computer hasn't been backed up since March! Remember, Richard is one of our key administrators, who handles a lot of the finances, immigration, personnel and employment issues... so his data is rather key to a lot of records that need to be kept.

Our computer geek worked and worked and couldn't get anything off the hard drive. It was impossible. So we were thinking all was lost.

So I prayed. And I prayed. And I thought, man, I even should lay hands on this little hard drive!

And guess what? An hour later, all of the data is safe and taken off the hard drive. And all I can do is credit the Lord!

Now why don't I pray and give the glory to God in other realms of my life like that?! Why are my fervent prayers and thanksgivings concentrated in the realm of IT?! I think I have a few lessons to learn here...