Some time ago, before I was born, my parents found themselves discussing heat. A home furnace, to be more precise. At that time, my parent's house was heated like just about everyone else's house - by coal. Coal was reliable, common, and fairly cheap. It would be delivered to your house in a big dump truck with a chute, which in turn would dump the coal into a trap-door like chute leading into your basement coal bin. I have been in plenty of older homes with these crazy things linger yet, the furnace itself long gone but the door and sometimes even the bin still intact, harkening back to bygone days.

Coal is very dirty, creating soot outside (lots of black flecks in the snow) and lots of excess dust in your house itself. Never mind the ashes that have to be disposed of every so often. Some towns had two trash cans on the curb, one for garbage and one for this pesky gritty stuff. And of course you had to keep going down into the basement to feed the furnace, else you would have to constantly be relighting it. Coal was a great source of heat, though, in spite of it being primitive and messy.

Dad's idea was to buy one of them there newfangled gas furnaces. Gas was really starting to catch on as an energy source, and folks used it for cooking, dryers, and other things. Dad felt the time had come for a change and since they already had it running down the street hooking up was a minimal cost.

Mom however was dead set against it. She had read how stoves or other appliances had "blown up" a house that caught on fire, and her mind was full of images of the house being filled with gas from a leaky furnace and igniting. Since newspapers seem to only tell bad news, she'd read lots of these stories and it scared her a little. Plus the cost - a regular "normal" coal furnace could be gotten cheaply and last forever, but these gas ones were expensive!

Apparently this was discussed quite a bit for quite some time - dad says often quite sharply, too - until dad finally "pulled rank" and made the decision to go with it. Mom respected this and his right to do that in spite of her feelings, and to save money (ensuring it was done to his satisfaction) dad installed it himself.

A year later, dad came home and told mom he was going to take that gas furnace out and put a new goal burner in. "Don't you even THINK of touching MY gas furnace!" mom told him. I guess a years worth of not shoveling dirty ashes, not shoveling coal (who do you suppose did that when dad wasn't home?) a whole lot less dusting, and cleaner air really won her over.

Obeying God can be just like that. We develop bad habits over the years, the same ones everyone else does. It's common and comfortable. Then someone comes along with this thing called the gospel, and its new and scary. It's going to "cost" us to have to give up old ways and embrace new ones. Even so, we give it a try.

A while later, someone may come and suggest us going out and doing the things we used to do. But surprise surprise, after we've experienced clean living, a focus on a heavenly goal (as opposed to aimless "why am I here?" living) , genuine affection from a group of people (GOOD people!), a feeling of joy knowing we are pleasing God, and nights of sweet dreams with a clear conscience and less stress... I think we can be pretty won over and it helps us avoid that old sin.

Besides, it's better to obey God and enjoy these benefits than suffer the heat from a different kind of furnace. It's not just coal that can burn.

Randy