I spend a great deal of my life troubleshooting technology problems. It is, in fact, my job (or at least a big part of it), and because of my abilities, it is also part of my life outside of work as well (being the family/neighborhood help desk is tough….).

I work with critical systems, where an outage has the potential to cost my company a lot of money. The ability to quickly recover from an issue that keeps those systems from operating is an absolute requirement.

For the software systems I support, there are types of problems that reoccur enough that it is worthwhile to document how to spot the errors and the process to fix them. So, I spend part of my time writing troubleshooting guides, which is extremely useful in the case I am not available to fix the problem and someone else is trying to work through it without me (and also keeps me from having to do phone support at all hours of the night). A well documented guide can save a whole lot of time and effort.

If only life were so simple. In years past, I was around the sort of church people who were almost addicted to what I call ‘fad-formulas’. Somewhere they had stumbled across some piece of spiritual revelation that provided them a set of well-defined steps to reach a particular expectation. The source of that revelation varied, but usually came from a TV ‘evangelist’, a traveling preacher or a book (by a TV ‘evangelist’ or a traveling preacher). If you had problem ‘X’, then formula ‘Y’ would be able to get you past that problem. In my experience, however, this approach rarely worked for me. The more I think about it now, the more it seems like a multi-level-marketing scheme; the only person who really benefits, is the one who invented it.

The best computer troubleshooters have learned from their experience, but also are not afraid to draw from the experience and knowledge of others to solve a problem. Not all problems are exactly the same, but some are similar enough to give you a clue as to how to solve it. I can’t tell you how many times I found a solution for my system’s problem from an error resolution for a totally different system. It was not an exact formula, but it was enough to get me looking in the right direction.

Life is infinitely more complex than any computer system. We all face problems small and large and in varying degrees of difficulty. No one’s problem is exactly like another’s problem, even if they are generally the same issue. I don’t think you can create a formula that will work for everyone, every time. I do, however, see enormous value in learning from the experiences of others who have come through difficult times.

Twitter friend and fellow blogger Lindsey Nobles left a comment on this post that really resonated with me.  She said “Don’t tell me how to do it, tell me how you did it”. It got me thinking about the value of our stories as individuals: our testimonies, the difficult things we made it through, our mistakes, our poor decisions and the lessons we learned from them. These things are much more valuable if we are willing to share them with others. The Bible is full of the same kinds of examples.

We may not be able to develop a step-by-step troubleshooting guide for life, but as we share our stories, others can see that some of us have walked through those dark places that they are facing now and have made it past them. At the least, they can find hope in the fact that you made it through, and believe that maybe, they can too.