Don’t forget to defrag

July 13, 2007

By William E. Richardson

“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10, NKJV).

I had no idea why the first computer I owned become so anemic. When I bought it the year before, it ran well. But in 12 months it had slowed to a crawl. I mentioned the problem to a fellow computer user.

“Have you defragged lately?” he asked.

I asked him to explain.

He said constantly storing and deleting information on a computer leads to gaps on the hard drive. That causes information to fragment. Then I understood. Like a child free to roam a toy store with a shopping cart, I’d spent 12 months adding files and adding new information to each of them. I also deleted a few along the way.

The first time I defragmented my computer really surprised me. When I clicked “analyze” I saw a lot of color, including plenty of red. According to the computer, red indicated fragmented files. I clicked “defragment.” The process took a lot longer than I expected.

I learned a valuable lesson that day; one I believe has a parallel in our everyday lives. In a sense, if not defragmented on a regular basis, a person’s spiritual life will also become sluggish.

Spiritual maintenance is a must! We live in a world that thinks and acts differently from how Jesus taught His followers to live. Without spiritual defragmenting, the non-Christian world will successfully add to and delete portions of who we are spiritually.

Fragmentation may occur without our noticing it. There are days we put off reading our Bible until later, then remember we forgot as we’re falling asleep. It becomes a pattern. Or we’re faithful to some new spiritual discipline until a surprise event crashes our routine. We later realize we’ve taken a detour. Fragmentation follows.

When we fail to “defrag” our spiritual lives, we’ll eventually see red flags. They may appear in our failure to carry out commitments, in fractured relationships, or with a feeling of general loss of direction.

Reassess your position. Evaluate where you are from where you should be. Decide what made you sluggish. Over time, have you accepted rather than deleted harmful ideas from non-Christian sources? Has your church attendance become sporadic? How about Bible reading? Has positive interaction with others needing to know God’s love lost its importance?

When you’ve determined where you should be spiritually, you can again align your priorities with God’s standard. Repent so God can erase the offenses. Pledge to return to the needed standard within those necessary boundaries. That includes both the places and practices you’ll avoid and the spiritual disciplines you’ll adhere to.

Like my first computer, you can get back to functioning on the level you should. But once you’re there, don’t neglect to defragment often. Not as an emergency measure, but as a preventative and life-giving measure.

William E. Richardson is senior pastor of Afton (Iowa) Assembly of God.