Lessons in Patience That God Taught Me This Past Week, and How You Can Benefit

Lessons Learned From a Crashed Hard Drive, or How Jesus Taught Me Some New Things About Patience

by Minister Paul J. Bern (Matt. 5, verses 11–12; James 1, verses 4–5; verse 13)

First, let me thank all my faithful readers who have waited patiently while I spent nearly all of this past week restoring my data to this new hard drive that I installed in my old desktop computer. Although I posted a couple of messages from my local Fed Ex Office on Medium, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Me-We alerting everyone that my website and email were temporarily down, it sure is good to be back. For all the rest, or who may be seeing one of my postings for the first time, my computer fell victim to a particularly ferocious hard drive crash this past week. But it didn’t take me long to figure out what the problem was, having spent 20 years of my professional life in the technology sector of what is left of the US economy. But my new hard drive’s arrival, combined with restoring my data and folders, took nearly a whole week, which is why there was no weekly email marketing for all this past week. Being a follower of Christ, however, these aggravating circumstances did not cause me to lose my temper. But there’s so much more to this than that. Let’s see what the Bible says about stuff like this.

First, it says in Matthew chapter 5 and verses 11–12, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets that were before you.” Is it possible that the hard drive that I replaced, which was only 7 months old, failed due to supernatural (that is, satanic) causes? Maybe, but there’s no way that a mere mortal like myself would ever know. Have I otherwise been insulted or threatened on line? I can’t even print some of the junk I have been told, mainly by Muslims and atheists but also by a surprising number (to me at least) of alleged “Christians” who condemn everybody who doesn’t believe what their little denomination believes in. This has been a problem within the greater Church since the days when the apostle Paul wrote what we now call First…