Are Your Files Backed Up?

As I write this weekly email, my computer is backing up its c: drive. We need to move the desktop computer to a new room, and I’m always a bit paranoid that something will go wrong, so it’s making a permanent record of the operating system, relevant databases, Excel and Word files, PowerPoint presentations, the 393 weekly emails I’ve written, and more. The bits and bytes are flying to an external backup drive even as I write this. I’ve been thinking that while computers and humans have certain characteristics in common, the ability to make and use backups is not one of them.

One might make the argument that memories are a sort of mental backup. Memories serve an excellent purpose, from giving context and perspective to life to turning into stories that endlessly entertain our grandchildren. However, as fine as they are, memories are not backups. Let me use an example.

Some time ago, I loaded some new software onto our home computer and things did not go according to plan, to put it mildly. It was so bad that the machine wouldn’t even boot off a USB thumb drive. It was an incredibly frustrating and alarming event that took me from 2 am to 8 am to fix (helpful hint: don’t install new software late at night). I was finally able to use a backup from a week before to get things up and running (second helpful hint: create backups regularly).

By returning to that backup, I effectively reversed time from my computer’s perspective. It was now operating as if nothing had gone wrong at all. All was well, and it could simply go on its merry way doing what it was supposed to do. All software installation mishaps, work it had done, files it had created, and changes to the operating system were yet to come in the future, if so chosen by our family.

Now, the restore from the backup had two distinct components: reading the backup image to see what had changed, and then copying the appropriate files back to the c: drive. The memory in this case was the backup image; the actual backup was a set of files that, when written to the c: drive, physically changed things to how they were earlier.

Humans have memories, which do not have the ability to change past events. We do not have backups that can actually alter the past and restore events to a prior time. However, there is an “exception clause” of sorts.

The things we want to change in our past are almost always bad things, not unlike the crash of a computer. The exception clause is that God is able to actually back up our lives to a pure point where the bad things didn’t happen, through justification in Christ. It’s as if those things never happened. The irony here is that we will still have the memories, but the events effectively never occurred in His eyes, which is what truly matters.

In the policy world, as in other aspects of life, we have our memories and would often like to reverse past events. Bills in our ND legislature that did not pass, decisions by local school boards, and questionable SCOTUS rulings. We have the memories, but can’t change the past.

However, that’s OK. Our failures in changing laws, losing elections, and other policy defeats are wiped clean with God’s backup. He simply asks us to be faithful and advance his Kingdom in the policy arena.

It’s a wonderful thing to know that there is a backup to overwrite every mistake and wrong I’ve done or every bad thing that’s ever happened (including a bad installation of software). Just don’t confuse memories with backups. The memories of these events may stay with us or fade over time, but regardless, the backups will always belong to God.