Deleting Old Saves

About a month ago, I blogged about how many games allow the players to save whatever progress they've made in the game. At the time, I focused on how this game-saving feature allows players to turn back time to relive game moments, change their decisions, or retry challenges. However, I recently realized that saved game files don't just let players turn back time; these save files also let the player choose not to.

Imagine that you're playing a game on your phone. You start at the beginning of the game and progress through the first few levels, but then you have to return to reality, so you save your game and put away your phone.

The next time you play your game, you don't have to start at the beginning again. You don't have to turn back time that far. You can pick up right where you left off.

So you do. You start again a few levels in, beat a few more levels, and save the game again. Every time you play the game, you can build on the progress you've made during the previous times you've played the game, and you make and save more progress each time.

Imagine, after goodness knows how many game sessions, you finally beat the game, achieving the culmination of progress made over countless game sessions. It feels pretty good. You save that completed game, then start a new game and beat it again and again and again, saving each completed game each time you beat it. Soon enough, you have a full library of saved games cataloging how many times you've beaten the game using various methods and self-imposed extra challenges. These game files create digital memories of your experiences and accomplishments within this game that have added up over years.

Then imagine that, while trying to organize the files on your phone, you accidentally delete all of your game's save files.

All of that progress. Gone.

You now have no choice but to quit the game forever or start again from scratch.

I thank God that life doesn't work like that. I'm glad that my experiences and accomplishments are recorded permanently in Heaven. Sure, there are some aspects of my life that I would like to delete or retry, but there are other aspects of my life that I want to keep forever, like my relationships with my family and the memories I've made with them. We are eternal beings, and we get to keep all the best parts of ourselves, including our personal and spiritual growth, for all eternity.

And, if we really want something deleted, God can help us delete it. We can repent of wrongdoings and have them scrubbed from our records. We can delete the sins in our pasts while saving the lessons we've learned from the experiences. We can save our progress and delete our regressions and transgressions. It's a wonderful system.

And as for the game on my phone, I'm choosing to see this as a new beginning, a fresh start that's even fresher than those times I started new games after saving old ones. I don't have those old game files anymore, but I have new adventures awaiting me, and now I have a fresh perspective on the importances of saving my progress, especially my infinitely-more-important eternal progress. That progress, thankfully, will never be deleted.