It Won’t Work
Yesterday I bought a wonderful little gadget. It was one of those automatic cleaners that goes in the swimming pool to help keep it clean while you are off doing something else.
It seems like every year my pool care gets worse. We have an above ground pool, which is very high maintenance in the first place. If it gets away from you, it can turn green before you can sneeze twice. Since that happens to me a couple of times during the summer, I thought this might be a great help.
The way this gadget works is really neat. It has a simple vacuum valve that jiggles it around a certain way making it crawl all over the bottom of the pool, munching and devouring any kind of foreign matter that finds its way into the pool. I was so excited! “Finally,” I thought, “I will get a handle on this pool situation.” We installed the little hummer and watched it work… for about five minutes.
Now you would have to be around me for a little while to understand this. The basic principle by which I live is that if anything can go wrong, it most certainly will. OK. We are thirty miles from town, we have a new gadget that works totally on the vacuum of the water pump. What happens, you ask? The suction line to the pump develops a hole. Now mind you, it wasn’t a big hole. It was just a little one, but a hole in the suction line means that the pump will suck air. If it gets enough it will stall. It won’t pump a drop. If it just gets a little, it will only pump a little, and in my case, not enough to let the new gadget work correctly.
Upon closer inspection I simply sighed and said, “Well G.K., what did you expect? Did you expect to do anything without trouble?
On the way to work this morning I thought about what I was going to have to do to fix the problem. It is very simple actually. All I need to do is replace the hose and we should be off and running. You see, when a vacuum or pressure hose has its integrity violated, it causes almost everything connected to it to either fail or function at an almost useless productivity level. That’s what happened to my new gadget. The gadget works fine, but one simple little hose whose integrity is violated shut it down. If it is not repaired right away I could lose massive amounts of water, the pump could burn up and I would be in a mess. The problem must be corrected and it must be corrected quickly. It won’t take much now, but if I wait the price could be enormous.
As I drove along this morning thinking about the hose and all that stuff, it hit me like a ton of bricks. “If my integrity is violated, it could shut my whole system down, or at least impair my productivity.”
Our integrity is a vital part of our being. Whether someone is able to depend on us or not is based on it. If it has a hole in it, if it is violated, it won’t hold water, and most likely, it will be the key to our demise.
In the Book of Psalms and in Psalm number fifteen, the writer is searching for answers. In the first verse he asked God a question about who. “Who,” he asked, “may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill?” As the writer searches his heart he begins to answer his own questions. He lists several things, all of which are a vital part of our integrity. When he gets to verse four, he says, “he who… keeps his oath, even when it hurts.” One version says, “he who swears to his own hurt and changes not.” What a powerful statement! This guy points out the need to keep the holes out of our hoses. He shows the need for integrity.
A person may not always do things right; we can deal with that, both in ourselves and in others, but when a person tells you something and then does not do it, they become very hard to believe.
I’ll pick up a hose today, take it home and clamp it on the pump and the skimmer of the pool and that problem will be solved. That will be a simple fix. On the other hand, if I find a hole in my integrity, fixing it is not as simple as clamping a new hose on and going on with life. To fix it requires that I watch it ever so closely, measure and meter my life and constantly ask myself if others can depend on me. If not, I need to do whatever is necessary to make it so. If I have a hole here, most likely, every other moving part in my whole machine may be in danger and the task God put me here to do will never be done.
Check those hoses.