I dabble in electronics now and then, and like many folks here I am nostalgic for things from days gone by. It's nice when these two interests intertwine to the benefit of both, such as the case this past Friday evening. I love my old Atari 130XE (home computer from the 1980's) and apparently so do a lot of other people. There are cables you can buy that turn your PC into a gigantic disk drive for the Atari, and just about every game ever made for the machine has been archived somewhere online by someone.

But I took the harder route. Acquiring the schematic for the cable, I decided to build it myself. I do this kind of thing all the time for "fun", although the sight of me hunched over a project board with solder in the left hand and a hot iron on the right, working over a bit of electronics while smoke flows from near my fingertips probably doesn't seem like fun to you! Yet since I do this, I have a good stock of spare parts so I only needed to purchase the more exotic ones.

I made a run to an electronics store and picked up a board, the required IC, some capacitors, and the gate diode. I thought I had everything else at home, since they looked common. But I was wrong! I needed a 10K resistor. A resistor blocks current. Kind of like a dam with water, the current has to exceed the resistor or it can't pass through, and even then it's controlled. 10000 ohms isn't that much, but all I had even close to the right size were some 3.3K and 1K ones.

Stop right there! You know, we are told to "resist" the devil and he will flee from us. What happens if we don't resist him enough? Sometimes that devil seems awful strong. We might believe that if we offer just any old token resistance he's gonna run. I would suggest we need to resist not to OUR limit, but to HIS limit. If we resist him and keep on resisting him, the temptation becomes less and less. The devil gives up and runs away! Sore loser, I guess.

I remember a Hagar the Horrible cartoon from looooong ago, where he visits Dr Zook who tells him he eats too much. The instructions he gives Hagar is that when he is offered seconds by Helga, his wife, he should put his hands up in a blocking motion and turn his head away. So later that day he is sitting at the table and she offers him seconds. He turns his head away, puts up his hands, and says - yes. Dr Zook didn't say anything about that!

Thus just a token resistance isn't enough for temptation. We have to be steadfast or the devil will build up that temptation until it spills over us. Maybe you think you are struggling with something that is too hard for you? Well, you might think about solving your problem the same way I solved mine. Instead of one 10K resistor, I used three 3.3K ones and one at 100. The point is it all added up right to be equal to the task. Still don't see the point? Why do you suppose there are passages like "confess your faults one to another" or "pray for one another" or "have fellowship one with another", hmmm? Because together we add up! The devil resists us, too, but with Jesus we are too strong to contain. Proving this world is not my ohm, I'm just a passing through.

Randy