Things come, and they go

Last Friday, my computer crashed. Having had Macintosh computers for the last 25 years, I had never had this happen before and I wasn't quite sure what to do. After troubleshooting every possibility, I came to the line in the instruction manual that says, "Contact an Apple Authorized Service Provider or an Apple Store retail location for more information." Gulp.

I was then told that indeed, I had done everything possible and it needed to be taken into a computer repair shop. No big deal. We have two other laptops in the house, so it's not like we were cut off from the world, or anything. Within two hours, the shop was back with me and indeed, everything was lost--music, photos, anything that we had put on the computer since the Fall of 2007.

I remember back in 2005, a few months after we had bought our beautiful new caramel-colored leather sofas, that John tried to brush something off of them. Turns out, the cats had been using the sofas as scratching posts and had taken bits of the color (and leather) out of the sofa itself. He was irate, especially after he called and found out that the furniture place could come and fix them for $75 per hole. Let's see--multiply $75 times 100 and the repair would cost more than the sofas themselves.

I remember I felt rather bad about it, but I've never put much stock in anything material. Honestly, as long as my family is safe and healthy, and I have my scriptures and my genealogy, I recognize that things come and they go.

After several days of being upset, John came to me and quoted the following scripture:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. (Matthew 6: 19-21)

He realized that he had set his heart a bit too much on the things of the world.

This was an easy lesson for me to learn and I felt that I had really already learned it. That is, until my computer crashed.

Thankfully, I had just backed up my genealogy files last month and this month on a flash drive, on my laptop and at Ancestry.com, so only a few photos lost there. However, every photo that we have taken since 2007 is gone.

Deep breaths.

Realized blessings:

1. My family is safe and healthy.
2. I still have all my genealogy that would have taken months (if not years) to replace.
3. Ethan figured out how to get all of our music files from our iPods back onto our hard drive. We just need to reorganize everything.
4. The local shop went above and beyond and told us something valuable. They told us to look through our homeowner's insurance to find a provision for coverage of "Loss of Intellectual Property". What this means is they will cover $1,000 of fees to recover files from our destroyed hard drive.
5. We do indeed have that coverage.
6. The cost of getting back all of our photos from a professional recovery service that has a 99% success rate? $1,035.

Even if there is no success, it's okay. Really.