For Wilshire Baptist Church
Last week was unusually busy with breakdowns and glitches.
It started Monday when LeAnn went to get something out of the little freezer in the garage and found it wasn’t running. The breaker on the socket had popped and while the freezer was still cool, it was no longer cold. If left to my limited knowledge, I would have thrown everything away and started over, or kept it all and risked food poisoning. Instead, we threw away what we had to – ice cream and fish for sure – and LeAnn smartly went into cooking and baking mode on the items that were redeemable such as ground beef and pie crusts. I couldn’t have done that on my own.
In the predawn hours Tuesday, my website underwent an automatic upgrade by the hosting company. I don’t visit my own website as often as I should, and I didn’t know until Wednesday morning that the site had crashed. After wading through diagnostics that I didn’t comprehend, I got on the phone and was paired with a help desk woman with an accent that I could barely understand. But I kept my patience, and she did the same, and we got everything up and running again. I couldn’t have fixed it on my own.
Thursday morning, I rolled out at 6:30 for a weekly breakfast meeting and something felt different as I backed the car out of the driveway and turned the corner. Two houses down the low tire pressure light came on and I made a U-turn and went home. There, I found the back passenger-side tire was completely flat; I had been rolling on the rim. I aired it up with an electric pump and went to get it patched. They told me it was a shard of sheet metal. Now I’m driving with the dashboard showing the tire pressures for a while just to make sure it holds. Meanwhile, I’m grateful for those who can fix what I can’t.
Later that day, I went to the neighborhood ATM to get cash and the machine told me my account was frozen due to “irregular activity.” A text followed immediately listing the transactions and they were not irregular at all. I had to go through the process of verifying them and reactivating my account. I was irritated, or course, but I appreciate the bank looking out for me in ways that I can’t.
Thursday afternoon my parents’ TV went blank except for a screen message from the cable company that made no sense. We tried to troubleshoot it the usual ways – unplug, reboot, scan for channels – and then I gave in and called the help number. A man on the other end of the line did some diagnostics and we chatted about the weather while the electronic devices ran through their tests and reboots and reloads. I found out his name was Paul and he was based in Southeast Asia. That’s a long way from North Texas, but even from there he fixed what we could never have fixed ourselves.
Saturday, we puttered in the yard and for me that included moving some flagstone and cutting some dead tree limbs. Some of the dead limbs were too thick for my loppers and two tall for my ladder. I can’t cut them myself, but I know who to call.
Oh, and I wrote something for this space last Tuesday and was advised by friends I trust and respect that I might want to reconsider my choice of words and their timing. The topic was about cultural and societal issues that I can’t fix on my own, and my words might have made things worse.
Just some reminders that we don’t live alone. We need each other. We always have and we always will.