The turkeys should have tipped me off!

Last night we had a ton of them perching in our back yard trees, many more than usually do. Deniese said it was probably because our property is sort of a safe hollow, and that they were probably trying to avoid all those winds since it doesn't blow much down here. About 30 seconds after she said "you should do whatever you are doing on the computer tonight because the power is probably going to go out" goof!

So I went out and fired up the generator. The same generator that I bought 12 years ago, have never drained the tank, and has old gas/stabilizer/etc in it. It fired right up and I was the hero... until after about 30 minutes when it went out. At first I thought maybe it was out of gas but no. Thinking to myself "what did that Robert guy tell me to do?" I knelt down in the dark, windy, cold sleeting night next to the fool thing and carefully opened up the little pan under the Garb. No gas in there although the donut float was moving freely! Feeling back along the gas line, I felt a subtle "crunch" of what must have been an ice pellet because out it came along with a flood of gas. Reassembling the contraption ever so carefully, I was very satisfied when on the first pull I was back in action.

Less than 10 seconds after firing it back up, before I even plugged it back into the side of the house, the lights all came back on! It was if someone was testing me - could Randy get this thing working in the cold and dark - and I had apparently passed. I would like to say I was the hero again, but my glory of fixing it was overshadowed by the joy my wife had that the true power had come back on and we were back to normal again.

I suppose the moral here is that although my friend Robert probably thinks he is wasting his breath on me, I do listen to him. While I have NOT drained out that old gas and am still relying on my own judgment in that regard, when things got into a pinch I considered carefully what he had to say. In fact, before I even opened up the pan I dumped a pint of alcohol into the tank, but it was too little too late. Robert would have done pretty much the same things - except for the small matter that he would have only started the generator up once and it would NOT have had a fuel line freeze up, because back when it was nice outside and in daylight, probably some summer afternoon, he would have drained the tank of the old gas (while sipping some ice tea) and this would never have happened to him.

Boys and girls I did what is called being reactionary. When you "react" to an issue rather than carefully planning to avoid it, you usually compound the problems until the task seems overwhelming, and almost always time is in crunch mode. David (not our other good friend, but the one from the bible) had an affair. Then got a good man killed, in a way that was terrible to his relationship with his battle commander and with God. He tried to further pass off a lie, etc. When we don't deal directly with problems, but let them mount up, they don't just add up one on the other they grow exponentially!

But take heart - it is also true that your children and your friends probably listen to you a lot more than you think. It would be nice that when the time of crisis comes in their lives, and it will, that they would think back and say "what would Robert do?" and "get the lights working." Of course it's even better when Jesus steps in and demonstrates his glory, to the joy of all! Even a turkey like me knows when its time to seek the safety of the hollow - of his hand.

Randy