A Labyrinthine Journey

… H A R D D R I V E F A I L U R E

3 days ago, the linux box that has served me so well for years decided that it needed a lot of attention. So it stopped working. Then while trying to figure out what it was doing one of my two old hard drives (8 Gigs, really big when I bought it) started going ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk. Those are not good sounds coming from a hard drive. This was amplified by the sounds of my power supply fan screeching from time to time.
The good news is that it did not hold any of my personal files. The bad news is that it did hold most of the /usr directory tree for linux. For those of you who don’t know, that is basically all of the functioning files.

I’ve ordered a new hard drive and a new power supply. I do not want to wait until the other more important drive starts going ka-thunk, ka-thunk. And I’ve been trying to get a basic linux server back up and running until that arrives when I will do a good clean install.

It took a full day to realize that the kernel that Ubuntu was wanting to install did not like my older CPU. That came this morning when I finally asked for help. Email is working, the web server is working. My wordpress is working. But my mailing lists are not working. I have already started to get emails from family members who are wondering what is happening.

I don’t know. Somehow I can’t get exim4 to talk with mailman even though I have read through every possible help message or FAQ I could find on the subject. Right now I will sleep. I won’t have a chance to get back to messing with it until later tomorrow.

Sometimes that is how it goes.

Good thing the first thing I am doing tomorrow is talking with my counselor.

This year we are hosting a delightful girl from South Korea through EF Foundation (I will call her Teresa, a name given her by some other students). I haven’t had a chance to talk with her about her reactions to the whole buildup of words and fear coming from the North Korean part of the peninsula. Today, she brought it up.

A teacher was asking students what they thought of North Korea seeking to build nuclear weapons. Our Teresa said that she couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say anything bad about the people of North Korea because they are Korean like her.

But the President of North Korea is Crazy, she said.

That is a very wise and healthy way to look at any group of people whose leaders do things we do not agree with. How would we like the idea that all Americans are painted with the brush of the actions of whoever our current President would be? Not very kindly. Can anyone really honestly say that “all United Methodists” think this or that? Not at all.

We do best not to try to represent our viewpoint as that of our group or our country. And we must practice the kind of just respect for others to separate the views and actions of a few with the hearts and minds of the whole.

We have been watching first with disbelief and then sorrow at the story coming from the Amish community in Pennsylvania. A story of deep illness that reaches out and touches children with death and infects a quiet community with grief beyond our imagination. How would we feel? How would we react? At what point do we set aside the words of Jesus and at what point do we set aside our own anger and hurt?

Then we have watched as a community of believing people do the unimaginable. They hold onto their hurt, but allow their anger to be transformed into forgiveness and compassion. Whatever we think about the backwardness of the Amish culture, here we see them being examples to all of us who call our selves Christian. They have embraced the family of the man who brought this pain into their core. And I even read today that they attended his funeral.

That is all I want to say at the moment. What I really want to do it point you to an excellent blog post that says it so much better. Go ahead, click and read; pray and live.

Ben Witherington: Lessons from the Amish– the Power of Pacifism

Sometime last week, I was having  a conversation with someone and the topic of the language of images came up. My friend commented that our language goes a long way in determining how we might face, lose, or triumph over what we are struggling with in life.

That got me thinking about my use of battle imagery with my depression. I talk about struggling with it, or fighting with it. I rejoice when I have won a battle and I get depressed again when I am defeated. As I reflected on that idea, I played with the idea that maybe my image of facing depression made it harder to become free of its affects.

The one image that I am playing with now is the idea of untying or unraveling depression. It sometimes seems that the negative attitudes and the responses of failure form knots and tangles that snarl my soul and heart. So the path toward healing is not found in adding to the frustration, but carefully and persistently following the threads and untangling the knots. When I have woven in the past, those knots would just appear somehow and to go further in making the cloth I had to stop and gently yet surely get the tangles out. Responding with frustration only made it worse and threatened to destroy the whole piece. My life isn’t as fragile as a cotton warp on the loom, but I do know that frustration does not help. A little bit of anger that can fuel the unraveling process is good, but the key is persistence.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t think this is magical by any means. But anything that can help lead more and more to freedom and vitality is welcome.

I am open to that anyday.