Bringing something up to a new standard always presents its challenges.

It doesn’t matter what it is, upgrading or moving to a new system is never smooth, such as going from analogue to digital – it’s a process. 

I was looking at a number of home movies we shot years ago when our kids were little. I had brought home the big, massive VHS video camera from the church, plunked a regular-sized VHS tape into the unit and shot birthday and Christmas events.  

… That was great while VHS players were a thing. Now VHS tapes and players are a thing of the past. 

The change in technology makes it difficult to save those memories for the future. I’ve almost lost the window to transfer those tapes to a digital format. But I still have a VHS player and I think one of my old video cameras can be plugged into it to transfer the recordings to digital.

I remember upgrading how I wrote sermons, from pen and paper to typing them onto my computer. I’ll admit I sometimes had a hard time reading my own writing. 

But when I forgot to hit “save” and my computer crashed, sometimes I lost pages of type … and you can’t even try to decipher what isn’t there anymore.

I learned the painful lesson that you should hit the save button every time you pause to make sure you don’t lose anything.

Well, last week I tried a new upgrade with our Christmas lights. 

I’ve been forever using the same strings of lights to give a Christmas feel to the outside of our home. But now our incandescent strings of lights are wearing out. Some of the sockets no longer work and lightbulbs are always going out.

I decided to go LED all the way. 

I headed to the store thinking it would be seamless to replace the four strings of lights I put on our house, only to find that the new strings are not 25 feet long like the old ones. They are 16.1 feet long.

My quick trip to the hardware store turned into a half hour of humming and hawing over what strings to buy. 

I also had to buy all new clips to attach them to our house.

I ended up getting five strings, but two of them had five colours of lights when I only wanted two. It took some time to swap out the colours I didn’t want.

When I finally got them all up, one string didn’t work. Sure enough, it was one of the multi-coloured strings. I had to switch the lights back to the originals and return them to the store. 

The new set I bought worked when I got them home but, by the time I’d swapped the lights out, the string didn’t work. I took that set back too, plus the other matching set that had multi-coloured lights. 

The time I spent on this project was as much time as I’ve spent over the last three years putting up and taking down lights. 

It’s all good now … but the updating was a royal pain. 

Here’s the thing: It’s never easy to make changes to your life. But if you don’t, at some point you will be unable to make changes or you might think it’s too hard and miss out. Jesus came to earth to pay for your sins and enable you to have a relationship with God, now and forever. Yes, the change may cause some challenges but, in the end, giving your life to Christ will be far better for you. 

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What do you need to update or upgrade this Christmas? Leave your comments and questions below.

Subscribe to my blog and receive posts like this one to your email weekly.