Colonel Panic

I imagined what happened as a physical attack. Colonel Panic led the charge. And when the battle ended, my computer lay in ruins.

At first, it seemed the hard drive had been overrun, decimated. Then it became apparent that the logic board had been trashed. I wondered, what next? Was the motherboard destroyed? I knew enough by then to understand the scope of the problem.

Kernels, not colonels, are tiny bits of information embedded deep in the computer’s memory near the root commands. At start up, they tell the computer what programs and applications to run. But mine didn’t want to do what it was designed to do.

One tech defined kernel panic. “It’s like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum. It knows what it’s supposed to do, but it refuses to do it.”

So for two months, I struggled for survival without my right arm. I sent my laptop to be rebuilt, restored. What I got back was a clean slate, as blank as the day I’d bought it.

I had to reinstall primary software and drivers for my printer. Afterward, for two weeks I struggled to rebuild my files, preferences, and various folders. The good news? I lost no data. Before the erase and install the tech instructed me to perform, I bought a 500GB external hard drive and saved my entire user file. But only when I attempted to restore all that data did I learn he’d taken me into a minefield.

Instead of using one simple software tool to migrate the information from the external drive back to my laptop, I had to move one file or folder or individual item at a time. After two more days I managed to reconstruct my mailboxes and address list and directories.

The moral of the story is simple: don’t drop your computer and expect it to work. And in life, don’t imagine that you can control everything that happens to you.

I didn’t drop my computer, but I did knock it off a small table. It never hit the floor. The power cord prevented that. The sudden motion sensor locked up the hard drive. I lost no data. No immediate damage seemed evident. But the injury was real.

Sometimes that happens to us. We’re knocked around and bruised on the inside. There may be no outward sign of any problem, but we’re hurt. We think about the words someone said. We interpret the actions of others. We take thoughts to heart.

The old adage says, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” That’s a shield we use for self-defense. But it’s always deployed too late. Colonel Panic has already attacked and we’re already wounded.

At that point we may know the truth—that God loves us—but we may not believe it as much as we once did. Instead we often believe what others say about us, suppose that their opinions may be at least partially true, and conclude that God can’t love us since we aren’t perfect.

But the truth is we never were. We were born defective. The concept of original sin—that Adam and Eve infected us by what they did in the Garden of Eden—is true. We’re not responsible for that; God doesn’t blame us. He tells us what’s wrong so he can fix us. Our kernels have been damaged. We know what we should do, but we refuse to obey. The result? We need a new logic board.

We can’t think straight. Our concepts, plans, ideas, values, viewpoints, and understanding are scrambled. We need our thoughts to be replaced with new knowledge, fresh wisdom. We need God to reprogram us.

He will, if we let him. His thoughts can become our thoughts, his ways, our ways. And when they do, we can trust that we’ll be fully restored. Nothing will be lost. We will be saved.


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