Deleted Forever?

Today I was in my gmail and noticed my "Online Orders" folder was rather full. It's good to save receipts and things for a time, but I had years worth of stuff in there so I started deleting the non-essentials. Then since I was in this clean out mood, I went over to my "Sent" emails and started deleting everything except the most recent ones that I was still waiting for a response on.
Finally, being extra tidy I went to the "Trash" and deleted everything in it.

Then just to make sure my cleaning hadn't disturbed anything I went to the folder where I keep all of the research emails for my book. When I opened it I found there were only 3 emails in it.
"Oh no, no, no," started to spill from my mouth as the temptation to panic was VERY strong. Two and half years of police correspondence and study was gone!

I quickly went to the trash and hit the refresh button. Instantly about 40 of the emails I'd deleted reappeared and about 19 of them were from my police file. A far cry from the 81 that had been in there, but I figured a few was better than none.
Still I wasn't going to give up yet. I've lost massive amounts of media in computer crashes before, and was able to recover a great deal of it through a variety of avenues, so there had to be a way to recover "deleted forever" emails, right?

I began to research how and the prognosis wasn't looking good. If YOU deleted forever your emails, they're probably gone.
But there was one option that people use for recovery after they've had their email hacked into. After completing step 1 I hit the button for recovery. They said they were working on it and things should start appearing in the next 24 hours. Then they told me how to do a more elaborate search to find the items. I went to my gmail and filled in the search criteria, to have the response come back as: No matches.
The clock was ticking, I knew if I had any chance of recovering these emails it was going to be right now. So I went back to hit the recovery button again. (If once might work twice would be better right?)
The response came back as an apology, they could not recover my deleted items.

I'd done everything I could do.

Have you ever heard that dark whisper of hopelessness telling you "Why bother?"

The alcoholic we prayed for has returned to drinking. That family we loved and supported is still falling apart.
I write books about the Father's love that very few people buy. I advocate for overwhelming issues like abortion, sexual assault, and suicide that still run rampant in our nation.
We adopt and advocate for orphans amidst the huge numbers that never seem to come down.

Why bother?

So many situations in our lives fell like they've been "deleted forever". Why should we bother fighting for the recovery of what circumstance has told us is gone?

After all of my efforts to get the emails back I returned to my Gmail to find a bold number 14 next to my inbox. I knew I had previously only had one already opened email in there so I quickly went to see what they were.

My eyes flooded with tears of joy and I wept as I saw 504 emails had been recovered and returned to my inbox!

The impossible had happened!

But what if I had given up? What if I had not bothered? My chances of recovery were zero to none. 

What if those emails, were people? What if I kept praying, I kept loving, I kept writing, I kept advocating, I kept championing the cause of orphans? 

How many more than my 504 might be recovered?