TED KLASSEN
The tidy little compromise

You have probably heard about the “Millennium Bug”, the potential worldwide computer meltdown that could, the experts warn, all but paralyze the planet come January 1, 2000. The trouble began in the late 1960s, when computers started showing up in corporations and government agencies. To save precious space, programmers wrote software in shorthand. References to years, which pop up countless times in a typical piece of software code, were abbreviated. For example, programmers used “68” instead of “1968”.

What seemed like a tidy little compromise at the time turned out to be a techno-geek’s nightmare. At one second past midnight, when 1999 rolls over into 2000, millions of computers all over the world will suddenly think it’s 1900 all over again. The only sure solution for getting rid of the “tidy little compromise” is for programmers to comb through millions of lines of programming language in each computer and change the two-digit years to four digits. The estimated cost worldwide of this painstaking task is 600 billion dollars.

All of us in our daily lives are also tempted, like the computer programmers, to make “tidy little compromises” that in the future will somehow have to be corrected.

The Bible also talks about actions and thoughts that negatively affect our future. The are called “sins” – acts of cruelty, unfaithfulness and dishonesty, and the thoughts that lead to them. The good news of the Bible, however, is that God sent Jesus Christ to die, thus taking the punishment for those sins. When we admit our sins and try to stop doing them, we receive God’s forgiveness. More than that, because Jesus rose from the dead, He can become the power in our lives to allow us to live the way we should. Has your life been reprogrammed in this way? Are you focused on the future rather than the past?