Opera! You wonderful beast, you!

What a wonderful gift I’ve received today! It almost makes me want to switch browsers just because I’m so happy.

Back in August, I’d created this pretty blog as a place to daily track my weight loss journey. I consider my great hobby to be web design and, whether it happened due to a crash in Firefox or an issue with WordPress, most of the style of this blog remained, but the content had disappeared entirely.

On face value, it would not seem so important, but the idea that dear notes I’d created for myself had vanished, never to be recovered, nearly pushed me to tears. I liken it to keeping a journal for years and then someone carelessly tosses it into the fireplace where it is lost forever. While I had only made two posts, both were very important to me, or else I wouldn’t have written at all and the idea that they were gone depressed me to a point so low that I just couldn’t even look at my computer let alone try to continue keeping a log of my journey.

As the original goal of this blog was to keep me accountable to myself since my short-term memory has long since failed me, the loss of the blog left me with no outlet and no means for self-reflection. By the end of August, I was back to my old ways and, by the beginning of September, I had gained back all the weight I’d lost. I’m not even sure when I’ve last gone to the gym.

I’m slightly ashamed to have let such a small thing get me down like that, but it is so rare that I allow things like lost notes to happen that I simply was not prepared for it, especially when I was already on edge by trying to rid my body of carbs.

But, I’ve received a wonderful gift today!

On a random test of viewing my The X-Files site in Opera (very nice web browser), I saw, with such abounding joy, that Opera had saved my previous session precisely as I had last left it in August, which just happened to be of this blog with the old original posts! Again, it sounds so simple, but it is very much like magically pulling my old journal virtually unharmed from its own ashes in the fireplace.

Not expecting such a gift like this today, I’m not sure I’m mentally ready to restart what I’d called the “last time” in August, but this gift has definitely got me thinking.

I’ve often witnessed God helping me along in this journey or that throughout my life and today feels like just another notch on the pole. Surely, it is just a coincidence that I happened to close Opera and never once opened it again (even after vast testing of several other sites and pages in the past two weeks) until I was telling myself, “I feel lost…I need a change.” today. However, my favorite The X-Files quote leaps to mind when I consider coincidences: If coincidences are just coincidences, why do they feel so contrived? I know the physics and reality behind my gift, but I still would never deny from whom it came.

Perhaps God is telling me it is time to get this excess “meat” off my bones and the only way I’ll be able to manage it is through personal accountability. I call myself a writer by nature. I write when I’m overly happy or sad or even bored, so it should be no surprise to me that I need to write in order to get something so important accomplished.