I was using my computer and a message appeared stating that a certain address was accessing my computer with a Trojan. Apparently this Trojan will find information on my computer and send it to the hacker. Fortunately, my computer firewall detected it and blocked them. I was a little offended by this invasion at first, until I realized a basic truth about my particular computer. I have an older computer and I was thinking recently about the things that I don’t have on my computer. That’s when it occurred to me that someone was trying to hack in and get something from my computer, which probably had less on it than theirs did. Yeah, I know, they were trying to get access to things that would become financially advantageous to them, but the truth still remains that they have a better computer than I do. What that tells me is that they are already better off in this area than I am, but they are trying to acquire something from me. Robin Hood, they obviously are not.
I had a friend in California who had a new speedboat, new Dodge van, a new Mercedes, a new ranch house in a great neighborhood on the end of a cul-de-sac (that’s a dead end street for those of you who are country folk like me) and to top it all off he had a 1972 Chevrolet Corvette. There was little that he did not have. Don’t get me wrong, he had a great job and worked very hard for what he had, but if he were a computer, he’d be worth hacking into, or so I thought. After several years I finally learned that he had one thing, which I did not want, on his hard drive of life: A huge, financial debt, which went along with all of his stuff. I can’t imagine what he might own by now. If he has a computer it probably has everything a computer can have. It would be worth a hacker’s time. Mine, alas, is not.
It’s a curious thing to me when a person has a computer and they use it to hack into another person’s computer to illicit information that is far less interesting than the information that they already have on their own computer. They could have saved a lot of time and effort just reviewing their own, more interesting stuff. I also find it fascinating that there are people who download viruses onto other people’s computers, just to infect and spread the virus, to no real advantage to them or anyone else.
We can understand then that as with my friend in California, and the case of this hapless hacker; what has the potential to contain great things may not contain them at all. In a very similar way, I have known folks that seem very religious in their public actions, but upon closer examination we find that those acts were actually attempts to win the approval of men and to prove to the world and themselves through these actions that they were “good people.” They believe that performing pious actions will validate them and give them value, when their real value is found in what’s in their hearts. I have known others who had little materially and who have suffered great struggles and yet have a genuine and generous heart for God and for all of His children. To look at them, they appear to have little to offer, but to know them is to experience the contradiction between appearances and the truth. What is revealed is a heart; a heart abundant in its invisible but priceless kindness and love for others. If only we could hack into the contents of those simple, loving and joyful hearts, extract the treasures of those files, and then download that simplistic love of Christ into the “heart drives’ of all of humanity. Now there’s a virus worth spreading. Blessings!

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « ONE-WAY STREETS
• » A Cast From The Past

• BROWSE / IN Newsletter
• « ONE-WAY STREETS
• » A Cast From The Past