Firm foundations?

It's a few weeks since I wrote my last blog entry, mainly because of some major problems which I have been experiencing with both my laptop and with our broadband connection.  We have also moved house since I last wrote: in many ways this has been a tremendous blessing, but also the source of some stress!

Sue and I have looked forward to moving since before we arrived here in Leicester nearly two and a half years ago.  We have actually only moved around half a mile, but we are now in a better geographical location and the house is much more suitable as a manse.

However, the move coincided with my laptop having a wobbly and refusing to let me access any files.  It was so frustrating, when I had so much to do.  I discovered the truth of the old saying that we often don't fully appreciate something (or someone) until they're gone.  Eventually a friend who knows about such things came and rescued the missing files (it's good having friends who are able and willing to help out in times of need!)

I then had to go about re-installing the Miscrosoft Office software, only to realise that the disc I needed was lurking in one of the boxes which had yet to be unpacked.  After having spent quite some time unsuccessfully trying to locate the disc, I decided to buy a copy of the one-year Office 365 software.  Unfortunately this turned out to be a dead-end (to cut a long story short, unbeknown to me I ended up buying a dodgy copy which didn't work!)

To add insult to injury, we have been having problems with our broadband ever since we moved.  We were without it for several days whilst BT got their act together (they had also changed our phone number after we'd told them that we wanted to keep the same one!)  Even when broadband was eventually restored it was very intermittent and it is still painfully slow at times.

There's lots more I could write but I really don't want to turn this into a big moan session.  Sue and feel incredibly blessed to be in our new home, and have received some really kind and caring support with our move.  We are very much looking forward to living here.  But the problems along the way have been fairly frustrating, not to say time-consuming.

And yet, when I look back to years gone by I can remember a time when people seemed to manage perfectly well without computers and the internet.  I was fascinated when, in a recent episode of the TV programme The Voice, Tom Jones spoke of a time in his childhood when in his South Wales village no-one in the street had a telephone in the house.  If someone wanted to make a telephone call they had to go to the call box at the end of the street.  Rita Ora, another of the coaches on the programme, who is much younger than Tom, found it hard to imagine such a time!

There is, I think, a temptation to place too much reliance on the trappings of modern life.  The reality is, of course, that although computers and mobile phones and the internet etc. can be wonderfully helpful in so many ways, we ought not to make such things a foundation for life.  Jesus told a story about two builders, one who built his house on sand, and one who built his house on rock.  When the storms came, the house built on sand didn't last very long.  Perhaps we could all do well to ask ourselves, "what am I building my life on?"