S05E033, Cogs, Bings, Engineers and me, Andy B 2 Minute Video
Our kitchen has a sensor which enables the lid to raise, and hold in place – open – at just the swipe of your hand. Or your butt if you back towards it. It really isn’t fussy!
Anyway, ours stopped working and a critical element of this capability is a small black box that joins a motor to the bin lid itself. And inside this black box are a number of small plastic white cogs, and one black cog.
In checking out to see what was broken one of these cogs flipped out, and I managed to knock another one loose: I did not know which way they were supposed to fit together, and there were an alarmingly large number of possibilities as I soon was to discover! I got there in the end, but with no details on how they should be, it took me longer than it needed to.
In life it can feel as though our cogs – the different parts of our life - are not meshing together well! Sometimes we need to have them replaced or just relocated. And, as Christians, that means handing over the keys to our car, so to speak, to the Holy Spirit. He comes, as the gentle person He is, to rearrange those parts of our life which have simply gone out of alignment.
But, in order for Him to do His work, we need to allow Him to do so – and that means inviting Him into our hearts and minds to put things the way they should be, and need to be, as per the Maker’s Instructions.
Just a thought...
Andy B
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Andy B: So another Andy B 2 Minute Video. And this is a kind of a 3 part series all around our sensor bin. A sensor being really, really simply, you will know you've listened to the last two Andy B videos, but a sensor bin is a bin with a sensor. You put your hand in front of the sensor and the top of the bin opens up, stays there for so long, closes, and it's brilliant.
[00:00:23] Now, I had cause, I had cause to take ours apart. It was broken.
[00:00:28] You could put new batteries in and it didn't make much difference to how far the bin would go up, and it was still drop down. And, actually there was a broken part inside, so a bit of super glue, from some ties, a little bit of Andy B ingenuity, I got it all apart, put it back together again, and it was fine. But in the midst of that is this black box.
[00:00:46] Now, when I was at school doing engineering in a, in a, in a metal class, we were told, don't ever use a black box in your drawing. And a black box is simply a box that's black, or blank, with some sort of mechanism inside that you don't talk about, that somehow makes [00:01:00] work, somehow makes something work from this end to the other end, but there's this box in the middle. And you've gotta design that bit in the middle to do something. You can't just have this blank box and somehow magically this engineered part is going to work.
[00:01:13] Well I had such a black box. An actual black box in this occasion. It wasn't blank and it was full of cogs.
[00:01:18] There were loads of white cogs of different sizes, and a little tiny black one. And, in the process of trying to fix my bin, I took this apart to think, is there a broken cog or has it come loose? And one of the cogs popped and it flicked out. And the problem is I didn't know which way it went. And actually in the process of fixing it, I managed to flip another cog over by accident as well without realizing, and it would not work!
[00:01:41] So, it took me several attempts at getting these two cogs, which I knew were potentially not correct, taking 'em out in different orientations, putting it all back together again, trying it until I got the right solution. Thing is some engineer, somewhere, has worked this out. They got it sorted. I'm not the engineer, I don't have their plans, so I had to guess.
[00:01:58] In life [00:02:00] it's a bit like those cogs trying to fit together. There's some upside down, some with a big one and a little one underneath, and it turns another one, and it's very complicated. And it's very hard to do that in life because it feels like, in life, there's all these cogs and sometimes they're mashing together and they're not fixed together properly.
[00:02:15] And we need to go to the Holy Spirit who will guide us to ensure that those cogs are fitted correctly. And when they are, we do what the Maker's instructions desire us to do, which is to live a life reflecting the light of Jesus Christ in the lives of people around us.
[00:02:30] If we get one of those cogs wrong, it goes wrong. So we go back to the Holy Spirit and say, Please would you help me? And He will!
[00:02:37] Just a thought.