This caboose heater is looking awfully nice right now. If it worked. And weren't in Greenwood. :-)
Thanks to yesterday morning's power outage, the thermostat and/or furnace have decided to go on strike. Jeromie and I woke up to blank alarm clocks (which were not responsible for the waking) & no lights, took showers by headlamp, and wondered about the cause. The power came back on minutes before we walked out the door, and everything seemed fine, so we went on our way. When we arrived home yesterday evening, we heard a clicking noise coming from the thermostat and turned the whole system off. When Jeromie turned it back on, the clicking returned, with no apparent activity from the furnace. Combine that with a cold rainy night and a cold rainy morning and you get a cold sniffly Liz and a yellow lab who has chosen to curl up in a ball on her bed for the duration of the day. I'm hoping it gets fixed soon, as my brain and fingers feel frozen, but in a way I'm glad for the inconvenience.
Lately I've been pretty frustrated at the American bubble and especially the role I play in it. If I'm not intentional about it, life is fairly comfortable and the state of the rest of the world (including the world right down the road from my house) is fairly easy to ignore. Since realizing this, I've been trying to be more mindful but much of the time it takes a swift kick in the pants from God Himself through Scripture & circumstances to peel the scales back from my eyes... scales that seem to grow right back! There is homelessness and dire poverty within a few short miles of my house... and freezing temperatures don't discriminate. There again is the same across the globe and I sit here in relative comfort, able to cook up whatever my imagination settles on for dinner. It's not as if this information is new to me either... perhaps just in a new context.
I know that seeking God & His kingdom first is the best thing I could ever do, yet somehow in daily practice I seem to do nothing more seek my own satisfaction. It makes me sick to see this pattern repeating and yet I don't know what to do to break the cycle but seek the forgiveness that Jesus provides and pray for the help of His Spirit to bring lasting change.
I'm going to go do that.
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P.S. "That makes me nervous" is NOT something you want to hear from the guy who's working on your heating system.
This caboose heater is looking awfully nice right now. If it worked. And weren't in Greenwood. :-)
This picture was taken just over two years ago... one crisp, late October morning in 2004. At that point I was driving too long and (most of the time) too early for a part-time job as a lifeguard. It's still amazing to me how time seems to fly and how things can change so slowly and quickly at the same time. At this point, I could wax theological about how God is changeless while I am always changing... and just because I don't doesn't mean He isn't (changeless)... but that isn't what strikes me most at moments like these. (And I am no good at waxing in any form... not even cars.)