day 1236: Records Retention

"Moses, as you and the people worship Me, I will meet with you and give you My presence. And when I reveal My glory to you, it will cleanse you."

What to keep?  What not to keep? What to keep and for how long?  These were once loose rules that we each made up for ourselves, but today, we can get in trouble for not keeping something long enough, or worse yet, for keeping something too long.  There are people who now make their living advising others on their records retention policies.  I grew up business-wise in the age of retaining. With the advent of the digital age we have gained with each year a greater and greater amount of available storage. The cloud and services like dropbox and box give even the smallest of businesses the chance to store and retain what never could have been kept before. There aren't enough steel storage case cabinets available to handle what even one of us stores today digitally. But, is this a good thing?  Ask a lawyer and the answer will be no.  Whatever is available is discoverable.  Whatever is randomly stored or randomly deleted is suspect. Knowing the different is the key.  It behooves us to have a policy of record retention, follow and embrace it.  Ironic, but in this age of more availability , that less is still better.

Every now and then we can also benefit from a little cleaning out and inventorying what we are retaining in our lives, both figuratively and literally.  God gives us the opportunity to come into His presence and have Him clean out our pasts and the sins that keep us from the relationship with Him that He desires.  We should have our own personal records retention program with God where we meet with Him daily to allow him to remove and cleanse us of our sins so that as we move forward to bring Him glory we can do so fully.

Reference:  Exodus 29:43 (King James Version)

day 1119: Forgetfulness

"No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead..."

Okay, in the spirit of full transparency, I have become more forgetful. Call it age, call it too much on my plate, or just call it too much data/information coming at me, but whatever it is, I'm more inclined to be forgetful today than in the past.  I've always been a note taker and today I am more so than ever.  What is cool about today is that with so many different pieces of technology that can help us store, organize and recover what we have gathered.  There is Evernote, which I love.  Our phones give us apps like Catcha and built in applications for note taking both written and spoken. There is also Dropbox, Google Drive and Box for storage.  I guess the problem could someday be that we become forgetful about what is stored where, but I suspect there will be a solution for that as well.  What is for certain is that with all of the technology solutions that there shouldn't be any excuse for forgetfulness. Within the coming years, those who are forgetful will become more obvious for being unorganized, lazy, or symptomatic of a greater problem. Will this make us more efficient and productive within our companies, we will see!

So, there is one area of our lives that we are to be forgetful and that is our forgiveness of others. Nope, we are not to write down all of the transgressions that others have committed against us and keep them for after we forgive.  Imagine if God was to do that with us?  If He managed our sins like a credit score, we’d all be in big trouble.  But, that is not God’s way. His way is to model for us the ultimate in forgetfulness.  Once we ask for forgiveness, He doesn’t keep track, He just forgives and forgets, like we should.  Being truly forgiving and forgetful towards others is one of the most powerful examples of Christ that we can take to work with us today. Imagine if our reputations were to be the person that everyone could count on to be truly forgiving and to never dredge up the past?

Reference: Philippians 3:13 (New Living Translation)

day 984: Clouds

"All scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach what is true and to make us realize what is wrong with our lives."

Here in San Francisco, we are in the midst of business conference season.  It started a few weeks ago with Salesforce's "DreamForce Conference".  This week is "Oracle World".  Then it is "BoxWorks" and on and on.  What these have in common is the emphasis this year on the "Cloud".  The Cloud has been around for awhile now but continues to be the focus of attention as we rapidly shift away from software applications residing on our hard drives and instead living on a web link that takes us to someone elses hardware to run the program for us.  There is great beauty in being able to access a program from any computer, not having to worry about backup, and allowing the upgrades to happen on their servers, not on my computer.  Even better is that, while unspoken, we all end up running on the same version, at the same time and this brings stability, consistency and ease of access for all of us.  As we all know, there is comfort and assurance when we know the rules of the road and know what to expect each time we power and boot up.  If only our businesses, and all of our people could be so predictable and if we knew, without doubt, that we could expect everything to be up to date and by the rules, each and every time, how much better our businesses and lives would run!

As believers, we have our own "Cloud" that is always up to date, consistent and assuring.  That is God's Word.  As we search for direction and as we look for consistency and promise, we don't have to look any further than the Bible that is sitting in front of us. God gave us His cloud long ago and maybe we are a little like the software industry that we each go through our own phase of development when we go from the times of independence where all in our lives must reside with us, to to turning over ourselves to God and His Word and trusting that someone else (Him) wants to do all the hard work for us and for us to just believe and follow.  What a glorious Cloud God has created for us.  Let's today find ourselves more and more trusting on Him and His Word.

Reference: 2 Timothy 3: 16 (New Living Translation)