Back it Up

I stood before the computer tech with my laptop in both hands, as if I were offering my firstborn into her care. “Dr. David, have you backed up your documents?” she asked.

I shamefully lowered my head, guilty again. “No,” I answered. I could hear the words of my son, Dave, echoing in the background of my mind: “Dad, how many times do I have to show you how to back up your documents? How is it that you can explain Blaise Pascal’s writings on faith and reason, and you can’t remember how to back up your documents? I just don’t get it.” I didn’t either, that’s why I fail to back up my documents. (I have since learned you can go online and receive instructions on how to backup your computer using an external hard drive, called a flash drive.) But now I was in trouble. My computer had crashed, and the hard drive was scrambled, which meant it had to be replaced. And worst of all was the news Kaylene Poff, my website manager and computer tech, broke to me, “If you don’t have it backed up, it could be lost. I hope we can save it.”

“Lost, as in vanished, irretrievable, gone…forever?” I hesitatingly asked.

My mind reeled, recalling just a few of the documents I not backed up: at least three chapters ( I couldn’t’ remember, it may have been more, I was too embarrassed to entertain the thought) of a manuscript I have been working on, numerous sermons, articles I have submitted, scripts of radio messages, syllabi, exams, poems I had written, not to mention pictures only in my possession---the picture of my son’s high school football team kneeling in prayer after a game, Lori and me on the beach, Lori and me in our garden.

At this point, I anticipated a deep, dark, foreboding funk overshadowing my future as I recalled a story from my days at Princeton. Dr. J. Christiaan Beker, Professor of New Testament Theology, was on a train in Germany with his doctoral dissertation in hand. He got off the train, realized he had left his dissertation on board, rushed back, only to find it was too late. The dissertation was gone. Beker descended into a deep depression, or so the story goes, and it took him years to come out of it and redo his doctoral thesis. Then there is author and Professor of Creative Writing, Andrew Porter, who came home from work one day to discover thieves had stolen his computer, briefcase, and disks containing everything he had ever written. After trying unsuccessfully to rewrite his material, he left his agent, sought another career, and didn’t write another word for three years.

Losing pieces of our work, which is a part of our life, easily extends beyond frustrating to depressing. The pictures lost in a divorce, the scrapbook burned in the fire, the children’s finger paintings left behind in the fifth move, the love notes forgotten somewhere in the attic of another house, all remain in the recesses of our memory until we want them, and find… they’re not here. No retrieval. No recovery. No redemption.

My grandmother Whitlock’s mind faded; I watched her memories of life disappear uncontrollably like letters on a word document being erased by a stuck delete button. Some things you can’t backup. Life flashes like a comet into eternity, too quick, too ethereal to backup.

It’s then that we have to trust those memories, the essence of our life, with the Someone to whom we pray will hold them securely in the eternal hardrive of the heavenlies.

“Good news, Dr. David. We were able to backup all your documents.”

“Thanks, Kaylene…for now.”

David B. Whitlock’s Life Matters, is published weekly. You can visit David at his website, www.davidbwhitlock.com or email him at doctordavid@windstream.net.