[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

MS Word

I still miss WordPerfect, which was my word-processing program for 
donkey's years, but it is gone and MS Word is what I'm stuck with.

I've just written a term paper for the distance course in learning 
disabilities that I'm taking from Athabasca University, and the 
danged program keeps shifting margins on me, paragraph by paragraphy. 
Athabasca expects me to use the American Psychological Associations 
style guide, which is firm on the margin issues: 1" (2.54 cm) on each 
side. So those margins have to be fixed. And since MS Word, unlike 
WordPerfect, does not allow the user to search for and delete 
formatting codes (which is why I loved WordPerfect), this has meant 
going through 19 pages (double spaced) and patiently repositioning 
the left margin and initial indent at the beginning of every single 
ever-loving paragraph. There may have been an easier way to do this, 
and no doubt someone will tell me, but only after I'm finished. Which 
I am, almost.

<sigh>

The only good thing about this situation is that it's given me to 
think about the issue of independence. MS Word is acting 
independently in fooling around with my margins. MS Word is so 
"helpful" sometimes it's practically crippling. Please, program, if I 
want those margins shifted, I will tell you. I promise.

But isn't this what we do with God, sometimes? Decide that we know 
what's best and proceed without a check-in with the Person in authority?

I mean, it's just so *obvious* what needs to be done, and we don't 
need to trouble the Deity's little head about it. We'll just go ahead 
and make the changes or fix the situation or the person without 
dragging God into it.  God's got better things to do with God's time.

Besides, if we dragged God into it, we'd have God all over our own 
personal landscape, which is a bit messy, and who wants God to see 
the way we really are? Another good reason to focus on fixing the 
situation or the person is that it allows us to evade focusing on the 
changes we really should be making to ourselves. Very tempting.

It doesn't really occur to us that (a) this means we think we're 
smarter than God, and (b) that's really pretty insulting to God, as 
well as being extremely bad theology.

Of course we know (at least in theory) that we should be turning the 
person or the situation over to God and let God handle it, and 
sometimes we can and sometimes we don't seem to be able to -- usually 
because by letting go of the person or situation, we admit defeat and 
we lose control, and who wants to do that?

Or sometimes it's because we truly do see a situation or a person as 
wrong or at least seriously misguided, and perhaps damaging to third 
parties, and we figure that we're the person to stand up and name the 
problem. And indeed, sometimes that is what needs to happen, as 
Martin Niemoller pointed out. But having named the problem, we may 
still have to turn it over, which means (again) admitting defeat, 
instead of trusting that somehow God is going to get all of this 
stuff worked out in God's own good time.

Because trust is what this is all about. Our own trust can be so 
deeply damaged that independence feels like the only safe place to 
be. If we've got trust issues, we may over-trust and get terribly 
hurt, or we may not trust at all. If we can't trust the people around 
us, then how can we trust a God we can't even see? Especially in a 
world so full of brokenness and pain and outright evil?

It rarely occurs to us that if *everybody* put down the need to win 
and control and meddle and "fix" situations and each other -- if we 
all (or at least a sizeable majority of us) -- simply looked at each 
other in humility and love and trusted God to do the work of healing 
God's Creation, we might find ourselves in a very different space.

MS Word does not trust me to manage my own margins; therefore it 
takes over the job, forgetting that it's only a flippin' program and 
not the boss of me, and in trying to manage me efficiently, it has 
cost me a whole lot of time and completely unnecessary work. But at 
least the margins are fixed.

The left ones, anyway. Maybe I'd better check the right....

(Thank you all for being so patient with me as I struggle to figure 
out what to write next.)
*****************************************
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain