Changing a light

I have an office in my basement. Well it was suppose to be my office when we moved into our house three years ago. It's this little room with a rickety old desk and some shelves.

What it really is now is a place to store lots of my stuff. I'm not even sure where all the stuff came from. Over the last couple years it's become a dumping ground of items I'm not sure where else to put. My wife will hand me something and tell me I need to find a place for it because it's cluttering up our living room......so I put it in my office. My home office makes my church office look really clean (and if you've ever been in my church office you'll know what kind of statement that is!)

Well this morning I needed to go find something in my office. It was kind of important that I find this item, so I could repair something that needed done today.

About a month or two ago I had changed one of the two bulbs in my fluorescent light in the office. When I hit the switch today I noticed that the other one was going.....so I should probably replace it.

There are no windows in my basement office. The door doesn't face a light source. So when you turn off the lights, there isn't much to illuminate the room. For some reason I thought it would be wise to try and change the light in my office without a flashlight or any other light source.

I took the cover off, took out the bad bulb and located the good bulb by feeling around. Now if you've ever changed a fluorescent bulb you'll know that on both ends of it, there are two little pins. These pins need to be slid into a little tiny slot in the light fixture. Once those pins are in the slots you have to rotate the bulb up into the fixture where it gets power and sits nicely without falling on your head.

In the dark, putting the pins in the slots was not an easy task. Once I thought I had it set I started rotating it, only to find that I only had one set of pins in the right place......so the other half of the light started falling down. After numerous attempts and lots of should pain from holding this stupid thing up over my head for a good long time, I finally got the bulb in place.

Here's what I was thinking though. We are standing in the midst of a mess. We're just trying to get some light to shed upon the whole thing. Yet we keep trying to do it ourselves. We keep fumbling in the dark, believing that we're smart enough to handle the situation on our own. In this scenerio Jesus would be my flashlight that was 30 ft. away. It would only take a very little effort on my part to fix the entire situation.....but here I am trying to go it alone.

Why do we do that?

In the garden of Eden before sin entered the world God walked with them. He spent time with them. I firmly believe he desires that of us too. He wants to spend time with us....to call us "His Own." And time and time again we say, "you know what God, I'm gonna take care of this thing myself." We all do it on some level.

God my prayer is that you come and illuminate things. Come make the task easier. Come walk with us.