Appendix: Miracles

I realized after "publishing" my last post that it didn't quite tell the whole story. It makes me seem like exactly the sort of self-sufficient individual it says I shouldn't be. I'm not sure how exactly to remedy this, since my idea of faith is, if not profoundly different from what it was before, not able to be articulated in the vocabulary I once used. But I do have faith, and I think it's what saves me.

I have faith that God, or a beneficent power, or the universe -- though the last two are a bit too "New Age" for my taste -- will not allow me to be completely destroyed. Every dealbreaker I've encountered in my life, as far as I can tell, has been attended to.

Like my computer crashing on Sunday.

I should probably mention that I didn't go to church, hadn't even thought about it, and that it was really the JFH that made it a dealbreaker.

Friday had been a Pizza Hut day, as usual, followed by an interview with a professor at the Local University, then five hours of my JFH. Saturday had been, as my posts indicate, a bit of a bipolar day (but one that ended with an excellent hot pot). By Sunday, Mom had chosen Chili's as the site of her Mother's Day, and I'd gone to the paper to steal the Internet. (To no avail -- the WiFi is free.)

When I came back into the room after a minute away, the blue screen of death was up on my computer. After a struggle too annoying to recount, my computer appeared to die. Completely.

I did a lot of things, none of which helped; I was given a lot of assistance, none of which helped; I called three people and left messages on their machines, none of which helped. The problem was not that my computer was dead. The problem was that it had killed my will to do anything about it -- it just seemed like one more thing than I could handle.

When Tyler called me back half an hour later, I was staring listlessly at the floor in the newspaper conference room/gum annex. When he talked me through the steps for fixing it and it actually turned on, I had to stay silent for a minute to keep from crying on the phone. My eyes teared up. I was unspeakably grateful.

I've never really needed something and not had it come through.