If you love Jesus

I love computers. They’re such a wonderful invention. Even better than doing stuff on a computer, like playing solitaire, is e-mail. There are some people that don’t like to write letters. I’m at the top of that list. Handwriting letters takes too much time and typing them on a typewriter was just a major pain. Just about the time all my friends and family gave up on ever hearing from me, except for the annual CHRISTmas card with the quick note penned inside, along came e-mail.

I probably communicate with more people now than I ever did in my life. It’s so easy. It’s even better with instant messaging. I can sit at my computer to “talk” to a friend in Canada and get an instantaneous response from her. That is so cool. She’s answering my text in less time than it would take me to dial her phone number, assuming I could find it in the first place.

E-mail has a lot of advantages. If you would like to know the cool websites to visit so you can get good pornographic stuff, I can point you in the right direction. Likewise, if you need a low-cost mortgage or want to buy Viagra or some other wonder drug, I’ll be able to help you out.

I didn’t realize exactly how popular I was until the advent of e-mail. Now, everybody wants to communicate with me, and they’re all so helpful. I get lots of messages telling me my credit card account has been suspended or there’s been some unauthorized use of the card. Bless their hearts, they don’t want to just let me know it’s happened; they’re standing by to help solve the problem. All I must do is give them all my personal information, like the exact card number, my social security account number, my username, password, PIN, shoe size, and what my grandmother died from. When I do, they’ll just correct everything. It’s not often you find people that are willing to go that extra mile to help others. These people are so helpful they even put a special link on there that takes me directly to a form I can fill out. Are they nice, or what?

They’re much nicer than the people doing all this stealing. I hadn’t realized exactly how much was going on, but at least one of my accounts will be affected two or three times a week. Thank goodness, the e-mails make it easy to clean up the problem by putting the special links in there, because there must be a zillion people out there messing with my credit cards. I’m just glad to know there are people keeping an eye out for all that thievery and letting me know it’s happened.

I’m not sure exactly how they got my e-mail address because I don’t do a lot of internet surfing. It must be because I occasionally go to one of the medical information sites, so I can check out what my doctor told me. Not that I don’t trust him, but the information on the internet must be more accurate, otherwise why would it be there? I think my visits to those sites are what started a lot of people wanting to e-mail me, because I get an awful lot of messages telling me about cheap drugs of some sort. Some of these messages come in with viruses attached. At least I know where to go and get a drug to cure it.

Some of the people that contact me make me feel sorry for them. I got contacted from someone in Nigeria. Talk about the information highway! Were it not for that e-mail, I wouldn’t know there are banks in the United States holding money that belongs to this poor Nigerian. They asked if I could help them out and they’d give me a cut of the money. I was tempted and would do it for free, but they needed me to send them some of my money first. Since the request was more than my ten-dollar spending limit, I declined. I didn’t respond and decline because I was afraid it would hurt their feelings in some way, since I’m not familiar with Nigerian culture. But I’m thinking of doing the next best thing. I may write my Congressman and see if they can do something for the poor Nigerian. It’s the least I can do for my new friend.

There are some e-mails I don’t even open. They go directly to the deleted files folder. You can probably figure out which ones they are. What amazes me is that all these people who know my e-mail address really don’t know I’m not into kiddy porn. I don’t consider those people my friends, so I just have the computer take out the trash for me. Unfortunately, it has a hard time differentiating between what I want to see and what I don’t.

I started out by blocking senders. That was pointless, because they never use the same address twice, so I gave up on that. Then I started adding message rules. If you’ve never done that, it’s kind of neat. You type in a bunch of words that you don’t want to read in e-mail messages. If a message comes in containing one of those words, it goes directly to the deleted folder. If you’re going to do this, I need to give you one warning. You’re going to have to type every cuss word you ever heard into your computer, and probably a few you haven’t heard.

The down side of doing that is the list gets pretty long. And you must keep adding to it. After you think you’ve finally gotten all the yucky stuff in there, they’ll vary the spelling on some words, so you need to also add those in there. Since I have words like mortgage on my prohibited list, some messages end up over there that I really would like to read, so I look in the deleted folder every day to see what I need to move back.

My least favorite messages are the ones that make me feel guilty. If you have a computer, you know which ones I’m talking about. They’re the ones that tell me if I don’t forward that message, I don’t love Jesus. If I just delete the message without sending it to everyone I know, then I am either too embarrassed or afraid to let anyone know I’m a Christian. When I first started getting them, I would forward them out. Not to everyone in my address book, because I’m pretty sure my credit card company wouldn’t want to get it, but I would forward to quite a few people.

The first time I decided that my faith was being held hostage by an e-mail message and deleted it, I must admit I was a little nervous. I was afraid the next day I’d go out and find I had a flat tire on my car. In case you’re wondering…it wasn’t flat. That just solidified my opinion that I wasn’t going to go to Hell because I didn’t forward a message.

I don’t think God really cares if I send uplifting e-mail messages. I send some if they’re good, but I won’t send one just because I’m told I have to. I won’t forward it just because I’m afraid the lice of a thousand fleas will infect my camel. Especially since I don’t have a camel. Even with my incredibly overactive imagination, I can’t envision Father up there, putting a mark in a book every time I delete a message without sending it to my friends.

I think he is much more concerned about how I live my life and what is in my heart than what is in my computer, so I’m taking a big leap of faith and only hitting the forward button on those messages I really like, and I’m not going to worry about the others. And, by the way, if you don’t send this to everyone you know, your hard drive will be deleted, your dog will die, you will lose your job, your spouse will leave you, and your camel (if you have one) will have fleas. Consider yourself warned!