The other day I had to bring our Buick in for a tune up because it wasn't running so well. I have learned that I have no skills when it comes to fixing our cars and so when I need work done, I should seek a professional right away! So, I went to see my mechanic named Dustin, who told me, "Joe you're only running on three out of six cylinders". So I said, "Wow, that sounds pretty bad, let's go ahead and get 'em running again buddy". Dustin laughed because he knows me well enough to know that I had no idea what a cylinder was or that I even had six to start with. So he took me into his garage where he had several engines tore down and he showed me exactly what needed to be done. The next day, when I went to pick up our truck, Dustin told me he could only fix two of the three bad cylinders and if I wanted to get the other one fixed, he would need to tear into the engine to see why the remaining one wasn't working like it should. He also informed me that I had probably been running with two bad cylinders for awhile but didn't notice because when two are gone they balance out "the miss", so you don't feel it and therefore wouldn't know it. But when the third one went out, everything changed. The situation got me thinking about life. How many areas in life am I running on less than all cylinders? And what if two of my cylinders are out, but it seems to me like everything is fine?When it really isn't? How do I even know I need to fix anything? I guess there are times when we just don't know something is wrong. But just like with our truck, I think when we don't know, God protects us until something changes or He puts someone around us to help us identify the problem. Sometimes we just don't know what we don't know and it takes someone else either telling us or simply being an example.
