This happened to me a couple weeks ago but I'm still blown away by it. One compartment in my life is as a hosting services provider. What the means is that I have a few servers sitting on the internet that I use to provide web, email, blog, etc hosting services to my clients. Well, a couple weeks ago, one of my clients contacted me. He called about 6 in the morning on sunday morning (always a good time to get a tech call). "Hey, my website is down. Can you take a look?" Ok, this might end up being a problem I thought, since this was the 3rd time he'd called me about this site. I just figured I could reboot the server and get to church and worry about the reasons later. I drove up to the hosting center (a townhome in volo) and went to the basement only to see the drive light on the server solid blue. Oy, thats never a good sign. I cycled the power on the box and it started to come back up, then stopped. Drive light stayed a solid blue. My heart sank. Maybe church was not in my future after all. I had some other xserve boxen there that were not being used so I pulled a drive out and stuck it in the problem box and started it up. The OS came up but of course all the stuff I needed was on the bad drive. I took a deep breath and stuck the problem drive in the secondary bay. Up it came. I breathed a sign of relief and started copying the webobjects application over. Copy finished, I pulled the problem drive and started configuring the server to host WebObjects apps. I look at my phone to see the time... 9:30, guess I'm missing Sunday School... Finish up configuring the wotask daemon and start the app up. Hit it with a browser... NO IMAGES!!!!??? Oh shoot, I forgot to copy the megabytes of images that make up the catalog for this site. ARG! Look at my phone again. Its 10:30 so I guess I'm gonna be pushing it to make church. I stick the problem drive back in the bay and watch with horror as the light goes solid blue again. I pull the drive, wait for a few seconds and stick it back in again. Solid blue light. Funny, I used to like the color blue but NOT TODAY! My mind is racing. Did I back up these images? I remember that at one point, several years ago, I used to host the static portion of the site on one of my linux boxen. I ssh into the box in question... cd /home/suburbanwheelcover/public_html/.. Run a quick ls -l on it. Yes! The images directory is there. from 2005. Oy. Oh well, better than nothing. I tarball the folder and a quick scp gets it where I want it to go. Untar it and hit the site again. Some images show, some just show a blank box. Oh well, better than nothing. At least the site is up and I can call Mark and tell him the sites live again. A quick glance at the time tells me that I'll make the sermon at church. Maybe a rest will help the drive work later.
Fast forward to that afternoon. I'm back down in the basement ready to stick the drive in the bay, hoping that it will mount and I can copy the correct images folder. I stick the drive in and hold my breath.. The light flashes a couple times and the drive icon appears on the desktop. YA! I open up a terminal and start to tar the images directory... a couple seconds later I see the light go solid blue again. ARG! I pull the drive and start praying (as a side note, isn't it interesting how we only start praying once we've come to the end of our abilities?). "God, I know you can just fix this drive with your power. This computer holds no challenge for you. Please touch it so I can copy these files off". The unsaid part of the prayer was "please let me copy these files so I don't look like an idiot for not backing up regularly". I stick the drive back in and it goes solid blue again. I remember Naaman and how Elisha wanted him to dip in the jordan 7 times. Maybe God wants me to show my faith by trying it more times than one. I pray again and the drive goes in the bay. Solid blue. Repeat several more times. Same outcome. Oh well, God never promises he will fix all problems that are a result of my own stupidity. I resign myself to having the hard discussion with the client.
I call the client and explain the situation. I ask, in a rather plaintive tone, "I don't suppose you have copies of those images on your local drive?". No such luck. He assumed I was making copies. Of course, I would have assumed the same thing if it was me. The only thing I can think to do is call a recovery service to recover the drive. After looking online, it seems it will cost about $1500.00. Ouch! I'm not going to want to explain that to my wife.
The next day, I'm back at the office and something tells me to just try the drive one more time. I walk to the basement praying, "God, I know I don't deserve your blessing in my life and in this situation especially and if you make it work I'll spread the word about your provision since it will obviously be you that makes it happen.". I stick the drive in and it mounts. I start copying the folder, keeping an eye on the light as it flashes with drive activity. 10%, 30%, 60%... My heart starts beating a bit faster. 80%, 90%, 100%! PRAISE GOD! I put the images in the correct location and hit it with a browser. IMAGES! YAY!
The above story started me thinking again on something that seems to come up a lot in my life. God blesses me even when I really REALLY don't deserve it. Which started me thinking deeper about it. Do I ever deserve God's blessings? I have to say no. No matter how good I try to be, or how wise I try to be, I still fall way short of God's standards for righteousness and wisdom. However, if we are in Christ, God doesn't look at our righteousness or wisdom, he sees Christ's righteousness and wisdom. God blesses me because I'm in Christ and I'm in Christ because God loved me enough to die on the cross for me, so God blesses me because He loves me and thats the real story here.
