Complications Can Take Too Much Time

When I was a manager at Universal Foods Corporation in the late 1970’s (I was there until 1999), there was a program we ran on the mainframe computer that ran more than twelve hours. It was for the imported foods division, which was not the largest company in our varied product lines. However, the month end program for closing the month ran longer than any other program on the mainframe.

Complicate: Five-Minute Friday (IBM 360 mainframe)

The problem was complicated by the code used to write the program. It was written in Assembler, which is a very different and difficult language. None of our programmers knew that complicated language. It was like reading some ancient language etched in stone.

We did have a contract programmer who was well-versed in Assembler. His name was Mike. Mike was a strange man, but brilliant, nevertheless.

One day Mike came to me before the month end run of the assembler program and told me it would run faster than it had in the past. That evening the program ran in less than ten minutes. I suspected something must be wrong, but the numbers were right. You see, Mike had stripped away the unnecessary complexities in the program to make in run efficiently.

Complicated Lives

We can easily convolute, perplex, clog, or entangle our lives with unnecessary things or tasks that have minimal value. These complicate our lives and our attention. For example, the simple act of choosing a friend can create huge complications. The Proverbs give us a word picture regarding how a bad friendship can complicate our lives:

“Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man,

lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.” – Proverbs 22:24-25

Simple choices can create not only complications, but they also distract you from the people who really matter in your life.

How to Identify a Follower of Jesus

A Jesus follower is like a soldier. There is one Lord and the allegiance is to him. The focus is not all that complicated. It is to please the One, Jesus, who enlisted him. “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.” – 2 Timothy 2:4

Five Minute Friday

This post is part of the weekly Five-Minute Friday link-up.

All scripture passages are from the English Standard Version except as otherwise noted.