Just a quick note today. Congratulations to President-Elect Trump and all those who supported him.
As we all know, elections are contentious issues in our country. Just about half of the country is guaranteed to be disappointed. Many times the winning candidate will speak of unity, or about “being a president for all Americans.” I think that’s noble, but things often go off the rails and that notion falls by the wayside quickly.
So today, I ask that if you’re a Trump supporter interacting with those who supported Vice President Harris, please don’t gloat or spike the football. It could be family, friends, coworkers, or the person you see at the grocery store. Maybe it’s at the Thanksgiving table in a few weeks. If we truly want to move forward as a country under the banner of unity, it’s not helpful to throw a victory in anyone’s face. Let’s assume we’re all Americans and want to move closer together, not further apart.
Maybe this post is reaching you a day or two late and you’ve already been an instigator in some of those “victory!” conversations. I ask that you build people up, not tear them down. Criticize ideas, not people. If an apology is in order, please follow through with one.
And if nothing else, at least the political ads are over now!
It’s not the best example, and I’m not fond of the idea, but since it’s a current event, I’m using it.
Think about the number 10,000. If you had to count from 1 to 10,000 you could do it, but it would take long enough to be super annoying, so it’s definitely a substantial number.
Yesterday President Biden announced an initiative to forgive holders of federal student loans up to $10,000 worth of their debt if they met certain criteria. These days education can be ridiculously expensive, so it’s very easy to incur that much debt (many times over, in fact).
Still, though, imagine waking up one day to the reality of having that much of your agreed-to obligation wiped out. Then, when you inquire about it, you hear “Don’t worry about it, it’s gone from your ledger.” All you can do is express thanks.
While 10,000 dollars’ worth of debt is certainly nice to not worry about, it’s still a quantity that we can mentally grasp, and most students can eventually repay. What if the total amount of all your different types of debt numbered in the millions, or even in the billions? Having $10,000 forgiven would still be nice, but it would hardly make a dent in the bottom line figure of what you owe.
Now imagine a debt so large that you can’t even comprehend it because it’s so abstract. What if you personally owed debts totaling one hundred trillion dollars? That’s a one followed by 14 zeroes. Nobody on the planet right now could pay back a debt that large. Not even the U.S. Government could do that. You’d have no hope of putting that debt completely to bed in your lifetime. The constant phone calls and mail from debt collectors would be all-consuming; the debt would be the only thing on your mind. You wouldn’t be able to enjoy food, sleeping well is no longer a thing, and you wouldn’t even be able to take pleasure in the little things in life.
But if you had your debt totally wiped out and the balance restored to zero, how thankful do you think you’d be?
It would be the largest weight ever…lifted right off your shoulders. That’s what Christ offers to you, me, and everyone else. There are two ways to get to Heaven: 1. live a perfect and sinless life, and 2. ride the coattails of someone that’s done exactly that. If you slip up even once, route number one is no longer an option. No amount of money can buy back a single mistake. Since nobody reading this can claim eligibility for the first route, you’re left with the second route, and only Jesus Christ has lived a life without sin. God hates sin, and He will not tolerate it in Heaven. When Christ sacrificed Himself on the cross, He essentially gave Himself as an offering that satisfied God’s wrath. That was Him saying “my coattails are right here, waiting for you to grab them.” By claiming Christ as Lord of your life, you gain the status of being covered by what He’s given. It’s Christ saying “don’t worry about it, it’s gone from your ledger.” You’re standing at the pearly gates, trying to get in, and Christ says “yeah, open the gates, they’re with me.”
Placing your trust in Jesus Christ as your savior is the only way for you to go to Heaven. When you trust in Him, your spiritual debt has been wiped clean. It’s gone. Even if you had been living under its crushing weight, it no longer exists the instant you welcome Jesus into your heart.
You want to talk about having a major debt forgiven? There’s no greater example than that one.
My old college laptop: before wireless capability, with a battery that lasted about 20 minutes
I’m not exactly the most technologically savvy
person out there. I’d probably still have a flip phone if the one I used to
have didn’t quit working. Up until a few months ago, I had a Blackberry. I’m
not yet to the point where I’ll have to ask my kids for help adding a new
contact, but I can see that happening some day. I had to get my wife’s help emailing
these pictures from my phone to the computer.
When I was in college, the school I attended was
pretty advanced as far as how “connected” the campus was. I don’t know what the
actual ranking was, but I think it was in the “Top 100 Most-Wired Campuses in
America” or something like that. Our class was the second or third that the
school mandated purchase a specific model of laptop. All our dorm rooms, classrooms,
and hangouts had Ethernet connections. It was horrible and clunky by today’s
standards, but it was pretty cutting-edge at the time. (Anybody else remember
something called a “dongle?”)
A dongle…let’s take the most fragile piece of equipment and put it where it’s most likely to break.
Some aspects of living on a wired campus were nice,
but back when this was all very new, we had a lot of network outages. Sometimes
it was only for a short time, but every now and then they’d last for an hour or
more, and it always seemed to happen exactly when you needed connectivity the
most. One afternoon I was in my room, trying to get something done online
before my next class. The network lost connectivity, and I wasn’t able to do
whatever I was trying to do.
For whatever reason, this outage was particularly
frustrating for me. Normally I’d just do something else for awhile and check
back later to see if the network was back up. This time I figured I’d go in and
mess with my computer’s settings; I thought I’d heard some tech-smart friends
talking about getting their laptops to work during outages sometimes by
changing some of their computers’ settings, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I
don’t even remember what I did…I think I changed some ports or something in a
tab somewhere. I couldn’t figure anything out and I had to get to class, so I
left my computer running on my desk and left for class, frustrated.
When I came back about an hour later, our dorm’s
Director and the college’s head IT guy were standing at my door, about to head
in. Apparently the network started to come back up, but the settings I changed
impacted not just my laptop, but the school’s whole network. Nobody on the
college’s IT staff could bring it back up until my computer was either
disconnected from the network or the proper settings were restored. It turns
out I was an accidental cyberterrorist, and the dorm’s Director had to vouch
for me so they didn’t get security involved. “Honest, I’m not a hacker…I just don’t
know what I’m doing!” I’m pretty sure they made it so net-wide settings like
that couldn’t be changed by unauthorized personnel after that. To all the
students that came after me and didn’t have to deal with outages due to fellow
students’ actions…you’re welcome.
(Not too long after that we had a weekend where
parents came to visit. We were having lunch on Saturday with some of the
parents, along with some faculty/staff. The professor that sat with us was one
of my teachers, and he was complaining about a recent time when a student
actually took down the whole network. He wasn’t laughing at the absurdity of
it, he was actually still kind of mad about it. I’m sitting right next to the
guy, having a hard time in his class. “Oh really, THAT’S what happened? Man,
that’s a shame.”)
Sometimes you make decisions that have an impact on
what you’re doing. Sometimes you make decisions that have an impact on what other people are doing. Even worse, with
some of these latter decisions, you don’t even realize the ramifications of what you’ve done until it’s after the
fact. I crippled the ability of the whole student body to do anything online,
and I did it without even knowing it. In order to set things right, an expert
in the subject area had to step into the situation and fix it.
There will be times when you’re the goober that gums
everything up, and there’ll be times when you’re the one in a position to help make
things right. The goal is to minimize the number of times you’re in the first
category and to not take it out on the goobers too bad when you’re in the
second category.
People make mistakes, and people let you down. We’ve
all done it. Some people are extraordinarily talented at holding grudges for
even the slightest of mistakes. While it’s true that you should take notice of
trends in a person’s “mistake history,” it’s also worth thinking about giving
them another chance, especially if you’ve already kept them in the doghouse for
awhile. If it were you that messed up, wouldn’t you want another chance?
I’m thinking of getting a t-shirt that says “I was a hacker before it was cool,” but because some people know I can’t even find what I’m looking for on Netflix, I’d probably have to tell this story every time I wore it.
