’Tis the season for back-to-school shopping, and last week I found myself at the computer store, picking up a laptop. The store employee behind the counter rang up the purchase and then looked at me.
“Do you want to get the warranty on that?”
“No,” I said. “It costs almost half the price of the computer. I’ll skip it.”
His eyes stayed steady on mine.
“But the warranty covers it if anything goes wrong,” he said. “If you drop it or spill on it or crack the screen or…” he kept going with a long list of possible disasters that might strike, and I could feel my mind racing along with his, my blood pressure going up just a little more with each scenario. I let him finish the list, assuming he was supposed to give a compelling talk as part of his job. And then I shook my head.
“Then I guess we’ll buy a new one,” I said with a smile. “But maybe it will be OK.”
Maybe, just maybe, we won’t drop this laptop. Or if we do, maybe it won’t break.
Maybe we won’t spill on it. Or if we do, maybe it will just be the Q key that’s stuck, and we’ll find a way to work around it.
Maybe this laptop will hum right along through the next four high school years without any disastrous events.
It might break or stop working. But maybe it will all be just fine.
There are times I will pay for a warranty. But I’ve always heard that if you skip buying most warrantees, you’ll have the money you need to replace the items you need to replace. So, I happily head out of computer stores and phone stores with no warranty and all the hope that it will be fine.
The truth is that I do love a leap of faith. And, as leaps of faith go, this is a minor one.
I could spend sleepless nights fearing that our technology will fail. Or I could keep the extra money in my pocket and remind myself—as I often do—that we’re almost always worried about the wrong things. A broken laptop is one of the easiest problems in the world to fix. The bigger problems, the ones we will wrestle with ourselves and hand over to God to sort out—those are the ones where we wish we had a safety net.
I might be willing to pay $100 or so to know that I could just hand those back for a fresh start. But even in those cases, we are reminded that even with challenges, God holds the future in his hands. Fundamentally, ultimately, everything will be all right. The picture is bigger than the part that we can see.
It might be challenging to trust that God is with us through whatever we encounter. It can be such a struggle to let go and accept paths and options we never would have chosen. But a broken road can still lead to a beautiful future. God invites us to take his hand so he can show us the way.
And he gives us all of that without any warranty.
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