Lost it all

Last night, well really all day yesterday I worked my butt off on a document for STATIC Youth. It’s a book for the fall classes on Service, STATIC requires that the middle schoolers perform a service project of some sort, and we decided that the book needed to updated and overhauled. So I worked hard making changes and edits, rearranging pages and all that. Theresa and I went over it, decided on more changes and edit that I would work on today and over the weekend. All was good, I felt happy with what was just created, and my energy was high. Then it happened, I lost the work, not all of it, just the work I did from home.

We use yahoo groups as our server to hold our files, we just started to use it, up until then we would email files around to each other or use our jump drives to transfer files from one computer to the other. But we decided that this would be better, one storage location for the both of us to go to, all the files there, and life is good! Unless you forget, like I did, that you have to do a save as so the file is saved to your local computer. Hitting the save icon did nothing, except save to a temp directory, so when I closed the application, I lost all my work. The good thing is I have a hard copy, it’s what Theresa and I used to look it over. Thank God I don’t like to edit in the computer, I’m still a person who likes the feel of paper and the ability to mark it up. Yes I have used the mark up functions on word and other programs, but for me, I like to print and see what it looks like. And thank God I do!

Now I have the task of doing the work all over again, and to me it will be harder, because yesterday the creative energy was at work, today it will be just retyping and formatting what I already did. No creative energy needed.

My hope and prayer is that the Holy Spirit will use this opportunity to inspire me to create something even better, to allow the creative energy to flow. But if not, I will retype it all, and be happy that I can do it.

This to me is a life lesson, I didn’t get mad, I didn’t yell or use words I should not have, I just thanked God that I printed it and went to bed. Life happens, and if any of you read my other postings or blogs you will know that I say that a lot, life happens. Well last night life did happen, it happened in the creative flow and in the not so smart action of closing the program down. So I celebrate the  fact that life can happen and that I can survive it.

Who knows maybe some good will come of this, maybe as I am redoing all the work I will see a major flaw or I will get a brilliant idea that will make this book the next must have book. Or maybe ill just redo it all so I can use it in the fall. I am good with whatever comes of it, life will happen, and I will survive.

Paul