Today’s Five-Minute-Friday topic: SETTLE

1 Peter 5:10 But the God of all grace, who has called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that you have suffered a while, make you perfect, establish, strengthen, settle you.

Wow! God called me, Angela Rueger? He actually wants to use me? But I fail every day. I mess up. I am easily unsettled when things don’t go as planned.

Take yesterday for example. I went to my laptop to retrieve a set of poems from a flash drive. I had not backed up my writing in a couple weeks, so I decided to do that first. The process consisted of copying the poems out of the “New” folder, pasting them into the appropriate folders on two backup flash drives (or so I thought), then deleting them from the “New” folder. Why I was not also putting them on the hard drive I did not know.

I had almost gotten down to the poems I had written for a special art project when I accidentally deleted the entire folder instead of just a single file.

NOOOO!!!!

To say that was unsettling would be an understatement. You see, when you delete from a flash drive, it doesn’t go into the recycle bin, it just disappears. You can’t even kiss it goodbye. It’s gone. Poof.

I checked my notebooks for backup, since I usually write my first draft in the notebook, but some of these were composed, or at least revised, directly on the computer.

And now they were gone.

It didn’t even ask me if I was sure I wanted to delete.

It should have asked me if I wanted to cry. I would have said yes. A tear came into my eye, but I did not let it fall. For quite a while I beat myself up for not being more careful, but even as the battle raged within me, I was also asking the Lord to settle my spirit and help me rewrite the poems that I had lost.

My daughter kindly made dinner, and we sat down as a family to eat. After dinner, my mind and spirit were settled, and I went to the bedroom to write. By 9 p.m. I had rewritten all seven of the lost tanka poems. This time I saved them to both the hard drive and the flash drive, then also sent them to the printer.

Then it occurred to me that there was only one flash drive plugged into my laptop. Could it be….? On a hunch I opened the recycle bin. And there it was—the deleted folder, complete with all my poems and other documents! Thank You, Lord! Thank You for making me revise my work. And thank You for giving back that which was lost.

I compared the old with the new and kept five of the seven new poems. They really were better. If I had not thought my poetry lost, I would have been content to use them as they were. I was happy with them. But God knew I could do better, and He made me try.

Photo taken in Milton, Florida, 2018