The Great Delete of 2009: An update
Thanks so much for all your thoughts from yesterday’s post. Through clenched teeth I found myself grudgingly agreeing with everyone who suggested that I let it go and just trust the Holy Spirit with the lost list (I liked annabenedetti’s analogy of razing the old mess to allow new, green growth to sprout up).
I prayed about it and went to bed early, and woke up feeling surprisingly at peace about it.
Though I did receive some suggestions for how I might be able to retrieve it (thank you!), I actually think I’m going to just let it go. I do have another, older list that has some good notes. But, mostly, I think this would be a good opportunity to trust: if the ideas originally came from God and he wants me to share them, I’ll get them back; if they were my ideas alone, squeezed out of my own brain just because I felt like writing about them, then it’s not all that important that I get them out there anyway.
I should include the caveat that it’s hard to say whether this is the result of great trust in God based on a prompting from the Holy Spirit or just me being too lazy to install retrieval software. I hope it’s more the former. But, either way, I’m completely at peace with just starting fresh. I’ve actually got a post ready to go today that’s the result of one of your new suggestions.
Thank you again for your ideas and support!
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You know, I didn’t have time to comment but I am glad this is where you ended up . In the past 10 years I have lost several computers worth of everything (stupid, stupid Windows 98, stupid hard drive, and stupid virus on xp–I LOVE my Linux). Which is why I lost your email address in the first place, all that time ago. That aside, I have so been there and have had that surprising peace–God does know exactly what He is about and loves to shake us up a bit and get us to stop relying on our own ingenuity so He can use us as vessels instead, and wow, He is so much better than anything we can come up with on our own.
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway tells the story of how he lost his luggage, which contained all of his short stories, at a train stattion in Paris. From then on, he worked as hard as he could to write something as good as those stories. May have been the secret to his success.