Power Points

By Audrey Stallsmith

On Thanksgiving morning, a sweating me was trying to mop the floor in the kitchen while my Dad and a couple of my brothers stood around in that limited space, talking. The sweat could have been due to my closing-in-on-menopause age or to the oven heating everything up. Or to the fact that I’d barely managed to get a gravy recipe printed off before my computer had completely conked out and refused to start again.

Aging like its owner, my Dell has its eccentricities which must be compensated for, but it had never completely balked before. And a computer is as essential to a writer these days as a bow is to a violinist. 

So a worried me felt like snarling at everybody, “If you aren’t going to help, you could at least get out of the way!” Actually, I suspect my relatives politely were ignoring me because they knew that other people’s implying I need help makes me snappish too. 

Therefore, our pastor’s reading of I Corinthians 13 the following Sunday had me feeling sheepish, when he got to the part about love not being irritable or touchy. By that time I had, much to my own surprise, fixed the computer.

For months, I had been working around the fact that the round battery in the motherboard was defunct. Although I had tried to remove and replace it, I couldn’t determine how to get it out of the prongs holding it without breaking off those prongs, which would make it impossible for a new battery to stay in place.

So, rather than persisting and perhaps messing up the motherboard completely, I simply left the computer on, so it wouldn’t have to boot. But then there were the times when the power went out or when I had to restart the Dell because it was freezing up. . . Such stresses always revealed that there still was something wrong at the heart of the machine. 

I would push the power button over and over, always getting the blue screen of death until the Dell finally got with it and offered to run a repair. I then would have to wait through that whole lengthy process, which I knew to be completely unnecessary, until the screen asked if I really wanted to start the computer despite all its dark warnings against such a precipitate action. Not to mention that I always had to reset the date and time afterwards because those, too, are controlled by that little battery. 

If I didn’t do that, the Dell—which apparently always reverted back to the time of its birth—would tell me that Google had no valid site certificate. (Yes, it is a very old computer!)     

After everyone had gone home on Thanksgiving afternoon, politely not complaining about the lumps in the gravy and there not being enough glasses or chairs to go around, I finally was able to get the computer to show some life by unplugging it and plugging it back in again. All my pushing of buttons, though, failed to get me to the repair function, so I was forced to look at the battery again for the umpteenth time. That was when I finally noticed that there was a prong missing on the upper right. Perhaps, then, one was meant to wiggle the battery out that way.

Sure enough, after I’d armed myself with a screwdriver with a very small blade, I was able to pop the battery out and pop a new one in. Now that I’d fixed the flaw at the heart of the computer, I just needed to do something about the flaw at the heart of me. 

On Thanksgiving Day, after all, I had been feeling anything but thankful. Part of it was due to missing my mother, since she probably wouldn’t have forgotten to get the cider out of the freezer, so we actually would have had something to drink with the meal. 

The cleaning may still have been ongoing at the last minute, since I’d be over-idealizing Mom if I said she was an excellent housekeeper. (Better than me, granted, but that isn’t saying much!) However, she did have a much better head for detail than I do and would have noticed that missing battery prong at once. 

Meanwhile, I am the type who would be quite capable of remembering the stuffing and forgetting the turkey. However, I would like to point out that my turkeys actually have turned out pretty well, thank you very much! Though, a couple years back, I absent-mindedly neglected to put the spices in the pumpkin pie and had to sprinkle them over the top instead.

Much of my irritability, I realized, springs from my lack of success at trying to be more competent in certain areas than I am. Or, perhaps, from trying to appear more competent than I am. 

It’s not as if I’m really fooling anybody anyway. My family and friends know me well enough by this time to realize that my mind doesn’t just wander; sometimes it gets lost in the woods. 

And it’s almost always when I’m feeling annoyed with myself that I began to snap at everybody else. So I suspect my frustration springs from hurt pride over not being able to make myself different than I am, no matter how hard I concentrate. That, in itself, I realize is a form of ingratitude. The things my mind drifts to make me a better writer, which is I believe, what God meant me to be.    

He did not make me to be the problem solver that Mom was, nor did he give me Dad’s ease at connecting with other people. I’m still the spacey and somewhat reclusive big sister who should be thankful for all that she does have, especially for those understanding family members who help me out by bringing the side dishes and looking for the things I forgot. 

So the problem really wasn’t with my lack of skill at planning, but with my hurt pride about it. And knowing about the heart defect—both mine and my computer’s—didn’t necessarily help me deal with either one. Especially when I just tried to work around the difficulty rather than addressing it. When the pressure was on, the flaws would still emerge, and both my computer and I would revert to a defensive attitude.  

Since we Christians are supposed to be powered by Christ’s spirit, we often get in trouble when we try to boot up the right attitudes ourselves—or pull ourselves up by our own boot-straps, as that used to be called! The only reason my computer still could function most of the time without the battery was because it was plugged into another source of power outside of itself.

Just as it is difficult for me to fight the way I was made, it is even more difficult for all of us to pretend to be “captains of our souls” when we were created to work in conjunction with a power greater than we are. What we do control is how much of that “electricity” we let in. So we often unthinkingly go on with trying to be our own power source, which is as impossible as that bootstrap thing. Although the army recommends that we “be all that we can be,” the attempt to be more than we can be is draining.

Yes, we may acquire more competence in some areas simply by learning from experience. I did remember the drinks for Christmas, though I have to admit the punch was a somewhat peculiar hue. (Hint: If you use rainbow sherbet when you can’t find the lime type, the color is going to look similar to what you get when you mix all your watercolors together.)

But all our attempts to be good are going to frustrate us unless we keep ourselves constantly plugged into and powered up by the source of goodness. And none of us are going to feel adequate as long as we base our worth on what we do instead of on whose we are.