Debugging

So last post I was writing about how worshiping Jesus is so much more than just singing along with the band on Sunday mornings. I also mentioned how I can worship God through working on my Scripture memory Android app. I want to expound on that a bit more.

So in church, my pastor was talking about how working in his garden has become a great time for him to spend with Jesus, because with each weed he rips up he asks Jesus to help him find the "weeds" in his life that he needs to rip out; the stuff that is causing him to sin and hindering his walk with the Lord. I hate weeding, and so something like this would never work for me. But as I sat in church, I starting thinking that debugging my app is much the same way. "Where are the errors in my code, and God, as I look for these help me find the bugs in my own life."

I want to share one example of this I had recently, of the bug in my code and how it related to my life. So you are going to learn a bit of code today!

One bit of Android is that everything you see on the screen is its own item, and each item is tied to the screen. When you add an item to the screen, you have to explicity tell the program which screen to add it to, and if you don't, then the app crashes. In code, you might see something like this:

Context mainScreen;
mainScreen = this;
View myItem = new myItem(mainScreen);

So what this is saying is that the context of the item I have made is the screen that is currently displayed, or "this" screen. Now when I was working earlier this week, I happened to basically write this:

Context mainScreen;
View myItem = new myItem(mainScreen);

And this is a problem. Basically what is going on is that I told the computer to reserve a space for a particular screen, and then use that space to make the item that will be shown. The only thing is that I never told the computer what to put in that reserved space, and so the code crashes because it is trying to add myItem to a screen that, as far as the program is concerned, doesn't exist.

And I spent the better part of an hour trying to fix this one mistake, to find that one line that I didn't even know I had forgotten.

So what I want to say by this (extremely nerdy) analogy is that one small mistake in coding can lead to a whole lot of trouble and frustration, just like the mistake of living a life without Jesus leads to a lifetime of frustration. Imagine that the code looked like this:

God inMylife;
inMyLife = Jesus;
Person Casey = new Person(inMyLife);

Now what this becomes is that there is a God that is in my life, and that God is Jesus, and I am adding that Jesus to my life. But if I mess up and forget that second line again, then I am reserving a space for a god in my life who does not exist. Jesus is the one and only Living God, the only one who can fill my life, and if I do not have Him, then I have nothing, and everything falls apart. If I try to fill my life with anything other than Jesus, I might as well not be filling it at all, because nothing else will ever satisfy.

So think about these things as you live out your daily lives. How can I look at the mundane things I do in a way that reminds me of Jesus and draws me nearer to him? And where are the "bugs" in my life that are keeping me from having this mindset every day?