30 Million Hard Drives

The hard drive inside your computer stores all the stuff. Hard drives are fairly reliable and according to data from a few sources, they last an average of 6 years of 24 hour use. That's 3,153,600 minutes. Most of us aren't going to run into a hard drive failure, though it does happen.

But if you relied on over a million hard drives, then the failures wouldn't be so rare.

Google is estimated to have something like 30 million hard drives across their entire operation globally. That means, by statistical analysis, that Google can expect a hard drive to fail once every 6 seconds. The systems that are used to run Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, and countless other services that we all rely upon without even thinking about it, experience rapid, consistent, ongoing failures. Thankfully we don't notice because Google has built their many systems to be redundant. Resilient. Resistant to failure.

Can you imagine the headache of having your own personal computer fail every minute or less?

So what if you are God, and you are having to deal with the rapid, consistent, ongoing failure of your children? Do you throw them all way and design better ones? Or do you build redundancy and resilience into the system?

Grace, mercy, forgiveness, healing, restoration... these are God's pre-emptive, pro-active, and re-active tools for dealing with our ongoing human frailty. We are his children, we are his family, and we help make up his Kingdom. Thankfully, he is fully tolerant of our problems.

Perhaps we should be as tolerant of our own failures too...
And perhaps we should be as tolerant about the failures of others...

What would your community, your church, your family look like if you were prepared for a failure every hour?
What would it look like if you preemptively, proactively, and reactively served your community in love, not to control in order to avoid failures, but to build around failures, and to restore, to forgive, to heal?