Ancient Church

As an excuse for not writing, this is even better than ‘my dog ate my homework’. As some readers know, some undefined glitch took down the blog upwards of two weeks ago. I was unaware of my problem for several days, but when I finally found out about it got on the phone with tech support at my web host, and innumerable attempts were made to solve whatever it was. Nice guys, those techs. They have a difficult job, and a technologically challenged deacon is just another in a long series of crises.

To make a long story short, the site was up, it was down, it was up again and then down for good. In the meantime, I had rescued most of my posts and stashed them on a free site. Everything else, including all of the pages (including Orthodox writers), seemed to be lost. I thought I had found the writers in a file, but that turned out not to be the case. I was very reluctant to simply wipe out everything, and that caused me to dawdle for several days, but finally there seemed to be no alternative. I called tech support, asked after the family of the now familiar voice at the other end, and asked him to delete all traces of wordpress. I had actually attempted to do that, but there was a recalcitrant shell of a data base, which would not delete itself for me, and to which new installations were attaching themselves. The family was fine, the tech said, and a half hour later he announced that the dogged database was gone.

A couple of days later, while working on my laptop I found what proved to be a zipped backup of the web site from January. I had not seen it before, so I was mildly surprised. I opened it, and discovered that among other things it included a pre-crash copy of the old Wordpress database. Under the theory that I could always start over again if the information was corrupted, I uploaded it yesterday morning, took a deep breath, and went to the site. Everything was there.

The lesson here is not that God rescued the blog. Shoot — the odds are at least even that He was trying to tell me to quit wasting time. After all, this is the third time the blog has crashed since I started writing it about two and a half years ago. No, the lesson here is, as my father sometimes says, that even a blind pig will find an acorn every once in a while. I, of course, am the blind pig. Call me Wilbur.

On the plus side, I was gratified to see that the world continued despite my absence. That is a lesson to all of us, especially Wilbur here. As the spider said, Wilbur is a humble pig. The current version (Wilbur 2.0?) is not humble enough, but working on it. It is certainly a virtue to cultivate.

So, I’m back. I’m also off to Johnstown in a few minutes. I’m at least as excited about that as I am about having the blog back up. There is a lesson in that as well. Blogs are fun, and even therapeutic, but they cannot begin to replace the flesh and blood world of the Church and our worship there. So Wilbur 2.0 is off to Atlanta, then to Pittsburgh, then to Johnstown, then tomorrow night reversing that trip at least as far as Atlanta. And, it’s Lent to boot! For this blind pig, there are no complaints.