Leaky Tub

Yesterday I was finishing up my shower, and when I turned the water off, the water kept flowing... not like drip........ drip...... drip, but like goooooooooooooooooooooosssshhhhhhhhh!

Needless to say, I was a bit frustrated... This house has been great, but it seems that nothing decided to go wrong until I decided to sell it.

Anyway, I'd always had a leaky tub that was annoying... and I'd even asked a contractor to fix it while he was here doing other things (which appeared fixed for about a week). So I wasn't really too keen on hiring it out again. I did a bit of research on the internet, and started disassembling. Two trips to Home Depot and about 2.5 hrs later I ended up diagnosing and fixing the problem! A small rubber washer had eroded away. This washer was responsible for forming the seal around the valve where the water comes out, thus causing my leaky, and now flowing faucet. A 100 pack of assorted washer sizes was $5, the tool needed to remove the encasement from the wall was $8 (basically it was a huge socket). So, all in all I fixed that sucker good for less than $20 and not too much of my own time.

After it was all said and done, and I turned the water back on to test the seal, several things raced through my mind in a flurry...

It started with: "Wow! I did it!"

Which led to: "Wow! *I* did it! And I didn't need ANY help!"

But then I started thinking about how weird that felt to say that. I remembered that all of my gifts and skills that I use in my life ultimately come from God (thank you Dr. Douglass). So I did the only thing I could...

"Thank you God! Thank you for giving me the skills necessary to work through and solve this problem and fix it with minimal effort. Thank you for allowing this problem to be minor enough that the likes of me could fix it without royally screwing something up. Thank you for permitting this to be done in a couple of hours, knowing that my house is on the market right now, and I cannot afford to miss any showings."

Which led to this:

"Thank you God for reminding me of where my abilities and talents come from. Thank you for bestowing those abilities and talents on me through your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your Holy Spirit who lives in me and works through me, which you have given me in your abounding and merciful grace. Thank you for bestowing on me that saving grace to deliver me from my own sin, for redeeming me and making me alive in you."

I'll be honest, I don't "get it" that often, but I think this is a glimpse for me of what a proper devotion to God looks like. In our daily lives, we use talents, gifts and abilities all the time. These should be directing us back to the Giver, the Author of those gifts -- God. A natural outflow of that, then is to be reminded of the greatest gift we have received as followers of Christ - Christ Himself. Thus, it would be a normal progression to start at point A (being happy that I didn't flood my upstairs by forgetting to turn off the water) and end up at point B (praising God for my salvation and the gift of the Holy Spirit in my life).

I hope this event has opened your eyes more to the reality of God working in and through your life on a daily basis. I can't say I'm always going to "get it" from now on, but I've definitely become more aware of my surroundings and I encourage you to stop and look around every once in a while as well.