"God works in mysterious ways...".

Two and a half weeks ago our computer gave us a warning that our hard drive was in danger of imminent failure.  This is normally one of those incidents that can be a near-tragedy, but we had our warning, and since I received a large external hard drive for Christmas I was able to back up and save all of our pictures and video before the computer died.  Our most important computer files were saved.


Then, because of a friend and church member's prowess in saving hard drives, we were able to make a copy of our hard drive so that when we purchased a new one, we were able to load it with every program and every file that was on the old one.  We didn't lose a single thing.  I actually looked at KJ and said, "If God was going to be so kind to give us a warning and save every single thing on the computer, I wonder why the hard drive had to fail in the first place.  It seems like an inconvenience that happened for no reason."  KJ said, "Well, it made us thankful."  That seemed like reason enough for it to happen to me.  Sometimes you're not thankful for what you have until you lose it (or think you've lost it).  


Last week we met Justin, a Chinese graduate student who brought us a new copy of Windows to load on the new hard drive.  He works for our friend who's been helping us with our computer problem.  We wouldn't have met him last week if our computer hadn't crashed.  And if our computer hadn't crashed, and we didn't meet him, KJ wouldn't have sent him a text message this afternoon inviting him to our mission community meeting.  Justin wouldn't have come tonight, and KJ wouldn't have received this tweet from him tonight after church:

"Thanks KJ, first time I almost fully understand what Easter is about

and resurrection and eternal life means. Good job."

That makes our hearts swell with thankfulness that our hard drive failed.

And speaking of Easter, here is a quick family photo taken directly after James awoke from his nap.  The most he could manage was to make eye contact with the camera.  More family pictures tomorrow.

I love James' sneer.