Score- Tonight:1- Jon:0

Jesus Heals a Man's Hand



Matthew 12:9-13
9 Jesus left there and went into their synagogue, 10 where there was a man with a crippled hand. They were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they asked him, "Is it right to heal on the Sabbath day?"
11 Jesus answered, "If any of you has a sheep, and it falls into a ditch on the Sabbath day, you will help it out of the ditch. 12 Surely a human being is more important than a sheep. So it is lawful to do good things on the Sabbath day."
13 Then Jesus said to the man with the crippled hand, "Hold out your hand." The man held out his hand, and it became well again, like the other hand.






That is how things work out sometimes. Sometimes one problem has to present itself in order for another, deeper problem to be brought to light. For the sake of practicality, I will share with you the order in which our bathroom brought Jessica and myself to a breaking point, and then rescued us from the brink of sanity.






For a long time our house was our little sanctuary, a safe haven from the mean world of the dispatch desk, the attorneys lackluster work ethic at Jessica’s place of employment, and the triple numbers on a golf score card. It was a place Jessica and me could go and relax, take off our shoes, and just kick back. It was, in a couple of words, almost perfect. Then, one day, a pipe sprung a leak beneath the house. Being the manly man (cough cough SARCASM cough cough) that I am, I tried to fix it myself! The key word there is TRIED. I made it worse, the pipe was so corroded that as soon as I put my hands on it to tighten it back into place, it crumbled into pieces making me feel simultaneously like the strongest most foolish man on the planet. Strong enough to crush galvanized steel, yet too stupid to see the obvious. A very polite plumber came out and remedied the situation with his black magic, and as he turned to leave uttered a single cryptic phrase that I forgot about until tonight. He said: "You'll have to change out every one of those pipes before too long, it's inevitable, these old pipes are all gonna end up the same way." Then he gave his parting salutations, and leapt upon his giant stallion, black as the night...and rode off into the orange light of dusk, with flames shooting from his steeds nostrils, and leaving a trail of dust in the vast expanse. Then I forgot about it, and went back inside.






A few months later, the same kind of a problem erupted under our house. A plumber came out and fixed what needed fixing, never once mentioning to me the cryptic warning that his predecessor had spake. Once again, I turned, and went inside after paying the nice man his money.






Then, just a couple of months ago, a sound began trickling its way into our ears in the Casa De Martinez. It was the sound of...well, trickling. A small sound, and every now and again the toilet would run its little "fill the tank" routine and the sound would stop for about a minute, then it would start right back up again. Obviously this led, in its own little way, to us obtaining a brand new throne. A couple of failed easy fixes revealed that the porcelain was broken inside the workings of the toilet and that meant that it was time to mosey on down to the local Lowes and purchase the loo of our choosing. We chose wisely. We brought it home. I killed and wasted time and put off the actual act of changing out the toilet due to the fact that I had never done anything like it before, and was a bit intimidated by such a daunting task. Then, I just jumped right in.






Everything was moving along swimmingly, no pun intended, when I got to the part that I thought was going to be the easy part, changing out the cut off valve. See, this little problem presented itself soon after the trickling sound, in an effort to save water, I began turning off the water at that point to conserve. (Hey, Earth. You're welcome.) So soon I began to notice that the valve was leaking. Flash cut to tonight. All is well, the toilet is all but put in, I have even scraped the mess of the wax ring off of the old mount. I grab the pliers and twist the cutoff valve. It doesn't budge. Then I give it another more masculine try. This time, it turns. But not in the easy way a thread comes loose after years of being tightened, no. It turns in the sickening manner one might associate with, say, a broken neck. IMMEDIATELY I know something is wrong. I go outside and get under the house in all the mud, blood and the beer. (No, not actual blood or beer, just a Johnny Cash reference there folks. Just wanted to clear that up for you unenlightened types.) That's when I see it. The pipe is sitting there strangely resembling Joe Theismann’s leg. It's CLEARLY broken. So no water tonight. No baths at the house. Nothing. I tell Jessica. She cries. I feel bad.






But just think. If we had put on that toilet, left the valve the way it was and not thought about it anymore, that pipe probably would have gone on leaking and leaking costing us hundreds of dollars in water expense. To find it out tonight was kind of a (EXAGERATION ALERT) life saver. Honestly, we could have poured hundreds of our hard earned dollars into the mud beneath the house, causing mold, mud, rotting, and all kinds of other things like a steady watering hole for stray cats. Evil creatures. And thus, back to the opening scripture, like the man with the hand, I wish that tonight had never happened, I am sure he wished that his hand had NEVER withered. Or perhaps it had been withered since birth, I am sure that he wished thousands of times throughout his life that it was whole again... But that day, when Jesus healed him, it meant so much more. His hand was presented as a stumbling block, but Jesus turned it into a stepping stone, to teach more people of the TRUTH of his Father, not the legalism of a few stupid laws that man had misinterpreted in his petty and pathetically small understanding of God. And a mans hand was healed.






So, after that long winded story about a Jon and his john, remember this, if you are in a situation that just seems to be getting deeper and deeper, look at all those problems and see if maybe they aren't the light on the dashboard, showing you that something deeper needs to be fixed. God in all his mysteries could just be waiting for you to cry out his name.






Blessings.


Sorry so long. So long! Jon.