Mom's Mysteries
And though I have the
gift of prophecy,
and understand all
mysteries,
and all knowledge;
and though I have all
faith,
so that I could remove
mountains,
and have not charity,
I am nothing.
— 1 Corinthians 13:2
I'm one of those people who did fine in school, but when it
comes to street smarts, let's just say I have a finely-honed imagination that
sometimes runs away with me. Finely-honed . . . or, my family would say,
"clueless."
There was the time I was convinced one of our kids had
scarlet fever because of a note sent home from school. But it turned out to be
CHIGGER BITES. Ohhh, yeahhh, we HAD just been doing yardwork. . . .
And the time we saw a big stand of tall, skinny pines along
the highway in northern Minnesota. I marveled aloud at the order of nature, how
each of those identical pine trees was spaced just far enough apart at the
trunk to allow their wide crowns optimal sunlight. Isn't nature amazing?
My family rode in silence for a moment. Then one brave voice
piped up. "But Mom! That's a TREE FARM!!!"
They never let me hear the end of it. We played golf on that
vacation, and they waxed ecstatic: "Isn't it MARVELOUS how God planned this
forest so that there would be 18 skinny meadows with no trees in them,
interconnected? And here and there a few sandpiles? And 18 round, flat places
with really short grass? Isn't the ORDER in nature just MIRACULOUS?"
No wonder I shot 110. All these COMEDIANS around.
I just hope they never find out about last week's episode, The
Computer Gremlin Holocaust.
See, my old computer was shot, so my computer guru brought
me a whole 'nother one, with the latest operating system. Then he did that bad
thing that computer gurus do - he left.
Fully intimidated, I plunged in, madly typed away an overdue
story, and with relief emailed it. Hooray! Back in the saddle again! I rushed
downstairs to cook dinner.
When I got back upstairs, to my horror, on my computer
screen were 179 pages like this:
+
-
+
-
+
-
On and on and on it went. WHAAAAA? When I tried to delete all
that unwanted type, more would be created faster than I could delete!
Then I noticed that there were not one, not two, but SEVEN
clocks on the desktop!
Meanwhile, Internet Explorer kept opening up, over and over.
In fact, 37 Internet Explorer home pages opened up! Thirty-seven! As fast as I
deleted them, new ones sprang up - a Hydra's head of electronically-generated
monsters!
I was totally mystified. I couldn't even click "shut down"
fast enough to stop the unwanted pages from opening.
Foul play! Someone didn't like something I wrote, and
they've hacked into my new computer and TAKEN OVER!!! Or maybe, since I write
about Jesus all the time and the Bad Guy doesn't like it, my computer's become
DEMON-POSSESSED!!!
AAAIIIEEE!!!
I panicked, because I had about 25
stories due for the magazine I edit. I was going to have to send out a magazine
with blank pages! Get fired! Thrown in jail. . . .
But the next day, my computer guru
solved the mystery:
"Sounds like a keyboard."
A keyboard?
But I wasn't even TYPING when all this weird stuff was going
on.
Ohhhhhhhh! The OTHER keyboard!!!!
When I got my new computer set-up, I put the old wireless
keyboard over to the side of my desk, and piled some books and papers on it. But
it still had batteries in it, and was still "live."
The books and papers that weighed down on that second
keyboard were accidentally doing the mystery "typing." That's all.
I relocated that keyboard to another
county, took the batteries out, got my stories filed, and have lived happily
ever after.
Happily, but still mystified.
But that's OK. God said in His Word
that He loves the rumdums just like everybody else.
But shhhhh! Don't tell my family about the mysterious typing.
I'll never hear the end of it! †
