The Bible Drove My Computer Crazy!

Tuesday I resumed work editing the Diary of Samuel Ward (1577 – 1639).

Ward wrote his diary by candlelight with a goose quill pen.

Trouble is, that although Ward was a translator of the King James Bible which was first published in 1611, in 1628 when he preached a sermon that I’m editing, the rascal didn’t use his own translation!

Oh, no. He reverted to quoting from the Geneva Bible, an earlier translation first published in 1570 and favored by English Puritans.

I’m convinced that Ward did this solely to drive me nuts.

That’s because all my reference books use the variations and phrases found in the King James Version. Thus quotes like “our hearts burned within us” are rendered, “Our spirits burned within us”. Not a big difference unless I’m trying to pinpoint the specific location of this phrase.

And although I am not a scholar, I do attempt to be accurate in citing references.

Ward also uses phrases from the original Greek, and knowing less Greek than most people, I have to chase these phrases down ad nauseam. Because I am no scholar, I need to be all the more careful in handling God’s Word and quoting from it.

Besides that, I’m an obsessive cuss.

Look at my work desk:

Open reference books, concordances, Greek/Hebrew lexicon, English dictionaries and grammar books, Several Bible translations, etc. litter the area around my computer.

I use these books to check and recheck things.

Of course, if I had to rescue one Bible study reference book from a fire, it would be a common ordinary English dictionary. Nothing helps me more in my devotions and studies than looking up ordinary words, words I think I already know the meaning of, in an ordinary dictionary.

The results surprise me.

The scene in the photo Ginny took earlier this evening shows the typical state of my desk.

Much of my life centers around books and the computer — a volatile mixture.

Here I worked, immersed in tracking down a Greek phrase this afternoon, when my computer went insane.

Anytime I’d move the cursor, five or six lines of text would be highlighted. Any time I clicked, right or left, those lines would be copied again and again. Then when I tried to move the mouse wheel to scroll up or down a page, the text would jump to 400 times its normal size, but nothing would scroll!

I tried undo.

Nothing.

I tried escape.

Nothing changed.

I saved and filed.

My desktop appeared. So I clicked on a different file to see if the insanity had spread. Ha! The file I clicked on was instantly copied six times on my desktop!

I shut down my computer and restarted it.

Same result. Only now it copied any highlighted file eight or ten times and would not un-highlight them.

Like rabbits they multiplied on my desktop.

“Bet I picked up some fatal virus the last time I browsed a porno site,” I thought.

“Be sure your sins will find you out”.

What is wrong with this machine?

I’ve never seen one do that before.

I tried this and that using all my computer skills for 45 minutes with increasing frustration then called my son Donald, a computer network administrator.

I described the problem.

He had me restart. He had me look for new desktop icons. He questioned me about each step I’d taken. He suspected that I’d dropped pipe ashes or tobacco flakes on my keyboard.

Again.

(He once gave me one of those miniature scuba diving tanks with compressed air to blow ashes our of my keyboard — The Surgeon General warns that tobacco flakes and pipe ashes in the keyboard may harm your computer).

Donald questioned if my mouse button was stuck?

Does the mouse wheel roll?

Are any keys stuck?

I looked intently.

“Well,” I said, “…. There is this one key… But it’s not exactly stuck”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Did you notice my open Bible under my elbow in the photograph?

As I piled books around my computer searching for the exact wording of a passage of Scripture, I piled my Bible on top of a concordance in such a way that the open cover of my Bible pressed down on the Control Key.

I had not noticed.

Any other key I touched anywhere was Control + Any key = Monitor Blinking Insanity.

Bill Gates recommends that you hardly ever do this.

This happened about 3 in the afternoon. I’d been working on this stuff since 3 a.m. I decided to knock off work and go swimming.

I moved my Bible, a dangerous book. But left all the other books piled where they were for tomorrow’s work.

Samuel Ward used a goose quill pen to write his diary.

Maybe I should too.