For Wilshire Baptist Church
Life sometimes seems like an endless chain of reboots. Or, if you want to join me in some alliteration: repairs, rebirths, renewals, replenishments, rejuvenations. But I’ll go with reboot because it’s so 21st century.
Such as last week when I went to my mother’s house to reboot her dishwasher. On a couple of occasions she has pressed the start button and it beeps and the lights flash but it doesn’t run. After one repairman said he could fix it and then declined to even try, a phone call to another repairman resulted in a simple fix: reboot the washer’s computer by cutting off the power at the breaker box and turning it back on. Voila!, that did the trick. Meanwhile, over at LeAnn’s mother’s house, her desktop computer started acting up and the solution was the same: reboot it by pulling the plug and restoring power.
Those are actual “reboots” in the true technological definition of the word. I heard that same word several times last year while strapped inside a radiation treatment machine. “Sorry for the delay Mr. Hampton, but the computers are not acting correctly and we need to turn the power off and reboot them.”
Some reboots are not so “on-off-on” and not really technical at all in the modern sense. We have an antique clock in our bathroom and occasionally it will quit running after I give it a weekly windup. It seems maybe I’m too aggressive and I wind it too tight. To release the pressure, I have to keep nudging the little brass flywheel into motion with my finger until the works inside relax and it is able to keep ticking on its own.
Earlier this week I mowed the lawn for the first time in months and it was touch and go with the lawn mower. I primed, pulled, primed, pulled, left it alone for a while, primed and pulled again and maybe said some prayers until it finally started. Even then, it quit immediately, but each time I primed and pulled after that, it would run a little bit longer until it finally roared into action. I’m not sure all that pulling was good for my shoulder that was surgically repaired in 2022. That, and my cancer treatments last year kept me from mowing for two years, so I’m undergoing my own physical this spring.
Elsewhere, the asparagus ferns hanging on the front porch were worn out after more than a year, so we put them out in the yard and bought fresh new Boston ferns to hang. That’s technically a replacement, but it’s a reboot for the doves and robins that didn’t like the prickly asparagus ferns but in previous years were drawn to the softer Boston ferns for nesting. We’re also planning a major redo of the flower beds, saving the reliable perennials and cleaning out the weeds and grass to make room for new plants.
Our nation seems like it’s in need of a reboot as our sense of community and “the common good” have been lost. The primaries this week and the general election in November might provide the opportunity for a communal reboot, but I’m not optimistic. The refrain we hear is, “the stakes have never been higher,” but that seems to be the refrain every election cycle.
On and on it goes. Maybe this is when we need to be most God-like — living as if we truly believe we are created in the image of God – and put more effort into rebooting, restoring and replenishing to create new activity, value and worth. If we can do this to our machines, devices, gardens and even our own bodies, why can’t we do the same for the people around us?
Isn’t this the sort of reboot we’re supposed to be working on during this season of Lent? The answer should be yes if we truly believe the events of Easter launched a new way of being or at least understanding our place in this world together.