If I lost my blog...

...I would most definitely curl up into a ball and cry my eyes out.  Then I would lecture myself for the countless times I said I should make the blog into a book for our family but failed to ever act upon the idea.  Then I would cry some more thinking of all the stories of our children, events that have shaped our family and the journal that the blog has become for me to remind myself of God's faithfulness over the past 7 years.  It would be a hard loss--one that would make my heart ache.  And that is exactly what happened to me this week.

I was actually working on our spring break blog post in a Word.doc file when I popped on over to check email and saw the subject line "Your account ***@gmail.com has been deleted."  Nervously I called up the stairs to Jonathan, "Did you just delete my gmail account?!"  He casually responded "Yea, why?"  My stomach flipped as I informed him it was the account tied to my blog.  I immediately ran up the stairs and his eyes were wide and mouth agape covered by his hand as he stared at the computer screen wondering if he had made a permanent and fatal error.

Since this google account was solely used to get access to my blog I never sent or received emails from it.  And apparently I was way clueless when I set up the account 3 years ago (when our work email would no longer allow me to publish on the blog) that you needed to put a cell phone number NOT a landline number for my contact security information.  With that one small correction Jonathan's mistake would have been reversed in minutes.

Instead, we failed to correctly answer my security question and got blocked out.  How could I have remembered that I used Jonathan's information instead of my own to set up the account?  So to the internet we went trying every possible solution, reading and posting on forums and finally resigning to the fact that I just didn't have enough information to verify my account.  There was no customer support number to call google and by the end of the day I knew it was lost forever.

Jonathan felt sick about it and could hardly look me in the eye all day.  I felt just as bad for him as it was a completely unintentional mistake as he was trying to clean up our accounts.  Poor guy...I knew that being in his shoes was way worse than mine.  After a dinner he could not eat, he found a way to recover my last 1.5 years of posts and save the written content to the computer.  It was something and better than nothing at that point.

The next morning Jonathan and I went out for coffee after dropping the kids off at school.  By this time I was still teary eyed talking about the loss, but my heart was filled with peace and acceptance.   I could look deep into my husband's teary eyes and with a smile say "I love you.  I forgive you and I am going to be okay.  I have you, I have my children and all the memories tucked away in my heart." Only God's working through the Spirit and abundant grace allowed anger to stay out of my heart and mind towards Jonathan and the unfortunate circumstances.  I can't explain it otherwise.

Thursday afternoon I continued my internet searching again and started to contact family and friends I knew who read the blog to see if they could see any posts in their readers. It was not too long after that that I tried to verify my account again for the 100th time when my security question popped up.  With the help of my father-in-law in recalling Jonathan's first teacher (again, why I used his info that not even Jonathan could recall is a mystery to me) I got the right answer and it was enough for google to initiate a phone call to me.  Within half an hour they had confirmed my ID and reinstated my account.  Oh, the tears that flowed when I read the email!  Thank you, Jesus!

The moral of the story:  Make sure your account recovery information is correct, backup or print your blog every now and then, and communicate with your spouse! :)