I feel like God was really trying to get my attention recently when I became unable to access my main email due to a server issue on ICloud. At first, I assumed the issue was coincidental, but as I went through the period of outage, I wondered if there was a spiritual lesson in trust attached to it.
It began early on a Saturday morning when I awoke and rolled over to check my email’s inbox on my Iphone. As soon as I tried to enter the inbox though, a message immediately appeared that indicated there was an error retrieving my mail. After attempting to repeat the same action several times to no avail, I next went to my computer and opened up my mail client to see if I could do it there. That’s when I noticed a similar error message appear telling me what my Iphone already had. My next and final attempt to retrieve my email came when I went directly onto the Internet through ICloud itself. And that’s when I discovered the error was actually with the server where my mail account was on.
For the next two hours, I was on the phone with tech support from Apple, going through one action after another, until they came to the same conclusion I had before I even called, that there was a problem with one of their mail servers. A trouble ticket was then generated and I was told it would take at least two business days for their engineers to even look at the issue. With it being a Saturday, I knew what that meant. It meant it might not be until Wednesday before they even knew what was wrong with my email and this server. I was a little frustrated by this, especially when I was reminded by tech support that I was using one of ICloud’s free email accounts, making it of low priority. I wasn’t very happy to hear this, but thanked them nonetheless for their help and hung up the phone worrying about when or even if it would get fixed.
You see, technology-oriented people like myself usually have at least one email address they rely heavily upon for various operations in their life such as banking, insurance, and various other financial institutions. Add in my personal business, blog, website, and plenty of friends who all have this email address, and you have one contact method I’m overly tied to these days. Which is specifically why all of this led to having an overabundance of worry and trust issues with Apple as to whether they would even make the effort to correct this problem. I even found plenty of user forums online suggesting they might not given it was a free account.
I ended up spending the majority of Saturday obsessing about this. I even re-contacted the person I had spoken with earlier from the ICloud tech support, but they had no new information to tell me, other than the only server being affected in this outage was the one my main email account was on. After hanging up the phone with them for the second time, I pondered what I had just been told. It was then I began to wonder if maybe there was a spiritual lesson in trust with this. After all, the one server I was on was the only one being affected? Most people would probably say that was just coincidence or bad luck. Not me though. I have come to believe these days that God speaks to us in a multitude of ways, even through things that are modernized like email and servers. Unfortunately, I didn’t stick with this thought for very long, and instead went back into panic mode pretty quickly about how many emails I would be losing and whether I needed to start changing over everything to a new email address immediately.
Saturday then turned into Sunday and my thoughts weren’t getting any better, nor did my trust in Apple fixing this issue given my email was still very much down. But as the morning turned into the afternoon, the thought re-emerged of this maybe being a spiritual lesson in trust somehow. Just so you understand what I mean by this, take my health issues I’ve been enduring for a good while now. I’ve been praying to God diligently for guidance, doing everything I can to become healthy on every level and in every way, including getting out of myself and helping many others since it all started. Alas, I’ve had little relief, nor found much of that through any of my medicinal or holistic efforts. All of this has resulted in me having some serious trust issues with God. But recently I began praying to God to help my trust be restored, which made me wonder if this weird email issue was somehow God’s response to that prayer.
Could my trust in Apple not fixing the email problem be no different that my trust in God not fixing my chronic pain issues? Well as soon as I began accepting that idea and decided it wasn’t worth worrying about my email anymore; I started doing my daily affirmations early that Sunday evening. And that’s precisely when I heard a noise on my Iphone laying on the bed next to me, which upon closer inspection saw my mail email was back up and running again.
So it goes to show that maybe there was a spiritual lesson in trust with all this. Maybe God really was trying to get my attention by having something so silly happen as my main email server going down. Well it worked, because I feel that somehow God was able to answer my prayers through this experience. And as long as I continue to maintain my trust in Him, I truly believe I will be fixed just like “The Cloud” eventually did for my email.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
