Back in the old days, when the snow was deeper, and you walked to school and back, uphill both ways, there were these places called radio-TV repair shops. The last one I saw was around 2003. Our TV had gone on the fritz, and we called the one shop we found in the Yellow Pages. Miracle of miracles, the owner made house calls. When he came out, he took the chassis out of the cabinet and motioned us over. We went to take a look thinking he had already found the problem. Instead he said, “Look here. These parts form a cross. You can find God everywhere, if you look.” He took the set away, and after a month or so, he had it fixed. Of course, it costs us almost as much as a new set.

When I was a child, there were lots of Radio-TV repair shops, but to save money my father would fix problems himself. We had an old upright radio, which would have problems from time to time. Dad would look at the circuit printed on the back of the set, study it, and after thinking about it, he would remove a couple of vacuum tubes. The North Side Pharmacy in Elkhart, Indiana had a tube tester where customers could test their tubes; the replacement tubes were in a cabinet underneath. Dad was not an educated man and had no training in electronics, but somehow it was always one of the tubes that he had pulled that was the problem. A few years later we got our first television set, and Dad repaired it the same way. Today, televisions are much more complex, and instead of a chassis there’s a sealed integrated device. There’s no way you can repair a modern TV. Like many of our modern devices, when they go bad, we just replace them.

Like the TVs, our lives today are complex; we have many demands on our time and attention, and we have many ways to fail. In 2 Corinthians Paul tells us that we should test ourselves. Fortunately, when we do fail the test, God doesn’t discard and replace us. When we ask, He saves us through His grace and makes us fully restored. Read 2 Corinthians 13:5-9 and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Jim

“Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves.”   2 Corinthians 13:5