Defragging my Mind

"One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14).



Many of you know I offer assistance to people who have problems with their computers. I use this as a opportunity to help people and to talk about life. I have many great conversations while I work on computers and wait for maintenance programs to complete. One of the things most people forget to do is to "defrag" their disks. I won't get in to the technical aspects of this much but disk drives are some times not efficient as they can be.

When the computer needs to write information to the disk drive it needs to seek the drive media to see where there is space to put the information. If you have used your computer for a long time without defragging your disk, the available space is spread out over the disk drive media. The more fragmented the disk, the longer it takes to read and write the information to the drive. A fragmented drive is slow and contains alot of extraneous junk.

I've got a similar drive inside my head.

Wow! That is alot of junk!

Unfortunately, the contents of my hard drive aren't as harmless as the fragmented drive on my computer. This drive contains a complete archive of bad things that have happened in the past, both things that I've done and things that have been done to me. I've got video, audio, and text, a whole multimedia display of negativity. When I least want them to, these things worm their way out of my past into my present.

I remember the times I embarrassed myself. I remember the times that I hurt other people. I remember my failures. I remember my sin.

I remember the times I was mistreated. I remember the ways that people hurt me, the things they said, the things they did.

I remember those times that other people let me down.

I remember …

None of that does me any good. Those things from the past only serve to slow things down, to spoil today with yesterday's hurts. Like those fragmented files on my computer, what I really need to do is get get them in order and get rid of them.

The apostle Paul wrote: "One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14).

I have to put my past in the past and set my eyes on what lies ahead. I have a God who is willing to forgive anything and everything that I've done, if I only let him. And he'll teach me to do the same with other people close to me, near and far on the Adventure in Middle Grove.