Erasing the Past

Here at the close of 2008, there is the natural tendency to look back over the past year(s) and feel comforted by the successes and good times, or shudder at the defeats and disasters we experienced. We might wish to rewind and erase the past.

Appropriately enough, I was reminded of the difficulty of erasing the past as I spent the last couple of days working on my computer. I saw first-hand why the State Department requires the removal of any hard drives from computers being put out of service and sold or donated. The argument: even if the drive is formatted, sensitive information could still be extracted from the drives. A piece of advice I read somewhere goes something like this: "The only guaranteed way of deleting information from a drive or laptop is with a .45-calibre bullet."

I was only trying to switch browsers and e-mail programs. Everything went well until I tried to transfer the e-mails from my previous program to the new one. I didn't want to keep all the old e-mails, obviously. I hadn't done any serious maintenance work on my e-mail files in 5 or 6 years, so I decided to go through and delete older and unneeded files from the old program. Thousands of files went into the trash---then I went to the new program, hit "transfer" and voilá! Everything I thought I had deleted came pouring into the new program...plus all the junk mail I had deleted as it came in, and I watched as the number of transferred files grew and grew. Final total: over 56,000!  I thought all my past was in the past, but here it was all before my eyes again...junk mail, receipts for mail that had been sent and read, every message I ever sent.

After several attempts, I was able to transfer only a small fraction of those 56,000 files, at least that's all I see when I open my mailboxes. (I really suspect all those others are still lurking in the dark corners of my hard drive.)

I'm thankful that when God says He forgives, He also says that our "....sins and lawless acts I will remember no more." (Heb. 10.17) No "undelete"; no "restore previous configuration."