Cycle Redundancy

----- "Do you know where I put that letter to the state department?" I asked my wife, as I searched

fruitlessly through a stack of letters and cards.

----- "Where did you lay it down?"

----- "If I knew, I wouldn't be asking!" was my edgy response."Somewhere in here, I think". The

letter was found, after a fifteen minute search by my wife, right where I laid it.

----- I have a problem with loosing things around our house - a problem that worsens with my

creeping age but nothing new. The week before we were married I lost our marriage license.

Never did find the thing. We were married without one, getting a replacement a few weeks afterward.

----- Two years ago I lost my wedding ring. I inadvertently laid it on top of the medicine cabinet,

and my wife didn't find it for six months. The wedding ring was presented to me as a well used

birthday present - 16 years used.

----- This "merry-go-round" of forgetfulness, more than not, seems irritatingly redundant. I

can never find my keys, combs, usable ballpoint pens, and assundary other items. So it

was a bit of a surprise when I discovered that even computers, these modern day

technological wonders, share this same human trait.

----- Formatting a diskette for an odd-ball operating system one evening, my heart

skipped a beat when one of the little red lights failed to go off. The disk drive

began to whir and a message flashed on my black and white monitor:

"Cyclical Redundancy Problem."

----- Having never experienced that particular error before, the flashing message scared me

until I realized what was going on. The diskette I was formatting had a flaw, a circular

path without an exit. The computer was momentarily caught-up in an endless rut; round and

round the drive's head traveled until a programmed chip sent the error message to the screen.

----- Cycle redundancy is no high-tech phenomenon. I've had that problem all my life! Periodically ,

I get semi-depressed with my own rut in life, and I, too, receive an error-message saying

"Stop! Take stock of God's blessings." When I do, my cycle redundancy problem disappears,

for a while. That same malady affected the Israelites.

----- "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how

often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks

under her wings, but you were not willing." Matt 23:37 (NIV) Spoken by Jesus to a

crowd of followers, Jerusalem was soon to crucify this same Christ.

----- Paul had a cycle redundancy problem too. "So I find this law at work: When I want to do

good, evil is right there with me." Rom. 7:21 (NIV) Struggling continually with the

problem, it was Paul's desire to be rescued from his daily battle with sin. And he was!

"Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (verse 25)

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new

under the sun. (Ec. 1:9) (NIV) Cycle redundancy was nothing new to the writer of Ecclesiastes.

----- Recent revelations about modern-day television evangelists support that ecclesiastic notion. From

Balaam (Nu. 22) to Simon (Acts 8:18) and from Aimee Semple McPherson to our present

biblical capitalists, we find that cycle redundancy problems are age old, not just characteristic

of a technologically advanced society.

This is one of my early efforts to get published in Christian Standard. It was rejected and I rewrote it a bit for WESTVIEW. Leroy Thomas was the editor, at that time, liked it. It was never published, though, because Dr. Thomas died not long after my submission. This article was done with the CPM processor in my TRS-80 Model 4P and then Squeezed using NSWEEP. I unsqueezed it to put it on the Internet. I love to use this experience as a basis for a sermon, ... or two. Written 1987. Never published.

Dale Hill (c) 1988