Russellings of the Spirit

It is good when things in life are reliable.

Reliable cars, reliable friends, reliable sources of clean water and electricity, and reliable air-conditioning units on days like today are sources of great comfort and joy, aren’t they?

It might even be true that the more topsy-turvy the world gets, the more I find myself drawn to havens of reliability.

“It is good to know,” I say, patting the gas tank of my lawnmower affectionately, “… that no matter what happens in our relationship with North Korea, you will never require more than three pulls to start.”

And so it was great angst that Joan and I faced the reality of a suddenly unreliable refrigerator in our house last month.

Refrigerators are supposed to refrigerate, right? You open the door, put food inside, close the door, and go on about your business… never once having to stop and wonder if your food is about to spoil.

Unless, as we so rudely discovered, you happen to own a Samsung refrigerator.

One day, out of the blue, this beast started making a really loud WHIRRRRRRRR sound that rose and fell in tone and intensity.

Then the whirring stopped… along with our refrigerator’s ability to cool or freeze food.

And it is not as if this is a really old refrigerator, left over from our college dorm days. It MIGHT be three years old, tops.

“Oh yeah,” said the first repairman who stopped by. “These Samsungs are pieces of junk. I can change out a few things that might help a bit, but I can’t guarantee it will last.”

Finally, after the fourth different technician from the same company, they just stopped returning our calls.

I don’t want to appear to blow this minor appliance inconvenience up to the size of an actual PROBLEM, but it was kind of a pain. I am not sure I remember ever owning a refrigerator that suddenly just decided to stop refrigerating.

But as I reflected on it, this incident did remind me that we live in a world of entropy… a world where nothing lasts, where everything – even this super-reliable, 11-year-old Mac on which I am writing these words – ultimately dissolves and crumbles into dust.

Heck, I suspect Old Faithful has failed to keep an eruption appointment once or twice in its life.

We will probably get a new refrigerator to replace this faulty, unreliable one. (Have I mentioned it is a Samsung?) But even the most reliable possible model (which, according to all of the repair guys who have been in our house recently, is Whirlpool) will ultimately fail and become a rusting pile of metal.

Want real reliability? There is only one place to find it.

As the Apostle Paul reminds us in his second letter to those Corinthian scalawags,      “ … because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”(2 Corinthians 4:18, NRSV).

Sounds tough, doesn’t it? Ignoring the cars and trucks, and lawnmowers, and escalators, and refrigerators right in front of your face, and keeping your eyes firmly fixed on things you can’t actually see.

Huh???

And yet, that is exactly the right reliability prescription.

In the history of the world, God has never failed in God’s promises to create, to love, to forgive, to redeem, and to save.

And he never will.

It is just too bad God never got into the refrigerator business.