This is the next installment of my “What does that religious celebration mean?” series. The first was Advent. We made it through Christmas. I forgot to write about Epiphany and now we’re onto Lent. So what is Lent?
Lent covers the six weeks before Easter and kicks off with Ash Wednesday. Many churches will have extra Wednesday night services so you end up going to church twice each week. The extra services are there to giive you even more time to reflect on the meaning of Lent. The whole point is to show us our need for a Savior and what’s about to happen at the end of Lent (Jesus’s death and His resurrection at Easter.) Lent reminds us WHY Jesus had to come to suffer, die and rise again. He did all that because we are sinners. The law that God sets forth in the Bible is very clear. He demands 100% aboslute perfection. If you can pull that off, you get into heaven. But as you probably guessed, that’s impossible .From the moment we are conceived, we’re sinful. If that’s all we covered in Lent services, it would be extremely depressing because we’d leave knowing that we’re heading straight to hell when we die. But the story doesn’t end there. After each reminder of our failures, we are presented with the reminder that Jesus came to pay the penalty for sin in our place. Through him, we are guaranteed spots in heaven and all that’s required is faith.
You may have heard people talk about Lent in terms of giving something up for the season. The idea has lost a lot of its good intentions. Many people now do it because they think they’re going to gain points with God if they choose to not eat Skittles or drink coffee during Lent. Nope. But giving up something for Lent can be a good thing if you use it as a constant daily reminder of the meaning behind the season for Lent.
So if you step into a Lent service, it might seem like a somber occasion. There’s black on the altar and there’s a lot of talk about all the suffering that Jesus had to endure because we are screwups. But stay for the end and you’ll hear the wonderful message of what that Jesus’s death and resurrection mean for us if we believe. We get eternal life in heaven. It’s the ultimate gift.
Great Wolf Lodge is an indoor water park a little less than two hours south of our house. It’s a national chain so if this post sounds interesting to you, check their site to see where the closest one is to you. Tyla and I have always thought it looked interesting as we drove by, but a quick check of the website proves that you’ll be a creeper if you show up without kids. So we basically had Elijah as an excuse to go to the water park.
It’s only the beginning of February but we’re already starting to get some warmer days. The lawn is waking up, plants are starting to grow, and people are starting to catch spring fever. I’m loving the increasing daylight hours. This time of year is usually very cloudy so on those clear mornings I’m shocked at how early it gets bright. “Spring” lasts a very long time in the Pacific Northwest. It’s roughly now until June and then summer arrives with a bang around the Fourth of July. I’m looking forward to those long summer evenings where we can go out for walks after dinner before Elijah’s bedtime. I’m also hoping to make good use of the warm summer weather on some hikes with Elijah. I’ve already tried to get him out a couple times but the weather and our schedule haven’t aligned. There are so many fun things to see in the mountains and I’m hopeful that he’ll like hiking with me.
You Can’t Screw It Up
My Dad was a contracter and his boss (the owner) got me a job during high school at a company that processes payroll for thousands of companies across the United States. I worked in the computer room processing the jobs. We had big laser printers that would print 150 checks per minute and it kept you pretty busy just feeding it paper, not to mention pulling 12 sheets out of it whenever it jammed or pouring a gallon of toner into it. it took a while to get the hang of it, but after a while it was fairly mechanical. I enjoyed the job though because the people were fun and sometimes I’d flip through the checks and hold one worth a million dollars. If I had changed my name to “Illinois Department of Revenue”, do you think I could have cashed it?
When I started learning the old mainframe system that ran the whole operation, I specifically remember hearing them say “Don’t worry, you can’t really screw anything up.” Challenge accepted.
The computer system had a bunch of “partitions” and each one could run an individual payroll job. One of our main tasks was to look at all the incoming requests and figure out how to organize them to get maximum throughput through the system. If I remember correctly, there was a background partition and then eight job partitions. The background partition was how you interacted with the system and submitted jobs to the either other partitions. When things went wrong with a job, you’d pause a partition by typing “P F3” where 3 is the number of the partition running the job.
On some very busy days, we’d squeeze a little more juice out of the system by running jobs in the background partition. It was a little risky because it would block user interactions while it was running, but if you had a really quick, high priority job to get through, it wasn’t a huge deal.
It was one of those busy days and I had submitted a job to the background partition. There was a mistake so to stop it from getting worse, I quickly typed “P BG”. Those characters will always be burned into my brain because basically it felt like when I hit Enter, the entire building ground to a halt. I had just paused the partition that the computer was using to listen to input from the users. So effectively the computer was happily chugging along with it’s ears plugged and there was no way to tell it to start listening again because it wasn’t listening to us.
Oops.
We all just kind of stared at each other with this “uh oh” look on our faces. People around the building started coming to the window of the computer room with quizzical looks on their faces. The president and the mainframe guru came storming in. I made myself tiny in the corner. It was a doozy of a problem. They were on the phone with IBM for THREE HOURS trying to figure out how to fix it. I still don’t know what they did but eventually it came back online and somehow I got a pass because I was the stupid intern.
So please, don’t tell me that I can’t do anything bad that you haven’t done before. I have a knack for it. Maybe that’s why I ended up geting a job as a tester for 8 years.