One of the ways a home can cost more money than it should is when the water faucet drips. We had that happen. We’d turn the bathroom faucet to “cold” so at least we weren’t wasting hot water. But then the kitchen faucet started dripping. We couldn’t tell if it was the cold or the hot side leaking, so the decision was made to fix both the bathroom and the kitchen faucets.
Sidebar:
I hate plumbing. If things aren’t done just right you’ll end up with a puddle on the kitchen floor. And that happened. At least it wasn’t a work day. When a wire gets broken, things just stop working. You don’t end up with a pool of electricity on the floor. A pipe breaks, and you end up having to fix things again.
Dad is one of the handiest people I know, so on a Saturday afternoon we turned off the water supply to the sinks and dismantled the faucets to get to the “guts” of what we were pretty sure needed to be replaced. Off to the store we went, and bought the replacement parts. Back home, we popped the replacement into the bathroom faucet, turned the water back on, and voila!
The kitchen sink, however, wasn’t such a walk in the park. The cylinder didn’t want to go in. Almost, but not quite. So we bring out the hammer. Still didn’t go. Turns out we’d picked the wrong size. The difference was only about one-thirty-second of an inch, but it’s enough to put the repairs into the “another trip to the store” category.
We got the right parts that time, and sure enough, the new one slipped right in. The tab lined up with the slot, we put it back together, turned on the water, and voila!
Clean up, then done.
Except for the pool of water the next morning. I had a guess, tightened a fitting, and it hasn’t leaked since.
But the hot side’s pressure is only about half what it was before, and the cold side is about double what it was before. I’m not a plumber. And I hate working on he plumbing in my house. I’ll be calling the plumber soon. Probably before this is posted.
When the plumbing in your house is broken you don’t call a landscaper, right? If there’s a problem with the wiring, you don’t ask a tree trimmer to fix things. That’s not to say the tree trimmer has nothing to do when a storm drops a tree through your living room, though.
A while back I was reading the news off one of the web sites I follow. “Politician XYZ says something stupid,” was (essentially) the headline. Another site proclaimed, “Politician ABC does this deplorable thing.” It’s hard to believe there can be so many stupid or deplorable people running our country. The thing is, they’re just trees falling into our living room because of a storm.
The issue isn’t the tree, it’s the storm. Without the storm, the tree would still be standing. So to solve the trouble with trees falling into homes we need to fix the storms.
Jesus can do that, but people can’t. Instead of getting depressed about the “stupid” or “deplorable” things being done, and thinking we need a different political party running things, we need to realize people can’t fix the problem of sin in the world. Only Jesus can.
Whenever power is available for imperfect people, corruptible people will be drawn to that power. HINT: we’re all corruptible.
But Jesus isn’t. If he’s not running your life, it won’t be done right. Until he returns, the nations of the world will all be jockeying for position. XYZ will always blame ABC for what’s wrong, and ABC will do the same.
It’s not the people who are the problem - it’s sin that’s the problem.
Stop calling the landscaper to fix your kitchen faucet.
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