Taking Another Route

I learned a very important lesson yesterday. Well, I guess you could say it took me a good part of the weekend to actually play it out, but yesterday I finally “got” it.

It all started with a new wireless router. The one we had been using was a hand-me-down and worked just fine for what we needed, but now that I’m working from home it has become increasingly necessary to encrypt my network (or in other words: make my neighbors start paying for their own internet service). So I went online, found a great deal on one, and ordered it without hesitation.

It got here late last week, so I set aside a few minutes Saturday to install it. Notice I said a few minutes. I’m sure you could probably guess it took a little more than just a few minutes. Yeah, try more like five hours.

Between my techy brother-in-law and I, we worked on that thing all Saturday afternoon and finally gave up. The reviews had said “easy, quick installation”, but we didn’t happen to agree. Nothing about this was easy or quick.

Monday I called the tech support number on the company’s website and was told that Timmy (THE tech support guy) wouldn’t be in for a couple of hours. I figured at this point I was in trouble, and began researching the steps I’d have to complete to make a return to an online store. It didn’t take much to lead me to believe that my new lesson to learn was somewhere along the lines of either “Don’t buy equipment online” or “Don’t buy anything from a company you’ve never heard of”. But then I called Timmy.

After all that work and manipulating of things I can’t even pronounce that we had tried on our own, Timmy had me go to one little page in the router’s program and change one little number. Seriously – just one digit of an address, and boom! I was connected to the internet and all was once again right in my ridiculously techno-dependant world. It was such a simple solution, but there was no way we could have found it on our own because we weren’t privileged to the same information as my new best friend Timmy.

That’s when the real lesson hit me – if I had just gone to the maker of the product when I realized I was in over my head, I could have saved myself (and my brother-in-law) a lot of frustration.

That whole situation seemed irreparable to me – I was more than certain that there was something unfixably wrong with my computer or that bargain basement router I bought. I was ready to give up on it all and cash in more of the money I already didn’t have to buy a more expensive, just as capable model. It just seemed impossible to get around any other way. In reality, however, the solution was simple for the one who actually knew what he was doing.

How many times in life are we ready to just give up on something (or someone) and cut our losses because we just can’t see how to make things work? If you’re anything like me, you’ve been at that point many times. I often find myself ready to give up on things like family situations, or “ministry opportunities” (isn’t that a nice way to to say “situations that you really don’t want to be involved with”?), or even just my daily grind of life. There are just days when it would be easier to walk away from it all because it seems impossible to find any peace or resolution.

But if I’ve learned anything in my life lately (and yesterday was just a good reminder), it’s that I have got to stop trying to fix those things myself, because I’m just not equipped with all that’s needed to get the job done. There is One, however, Who knows the perfect solution, and He’s always on call.

Jesus is the Rock to which we can always turn, and there is absolutely no situation that could ever present itself in our lives that’s beyond Him. He is all knowing, all seeing, all powerful and totally capable, and with Him nothing is impossible. That’s our God. That’s the One who knows you better than you know yourself, and the One who has the answers to every question you could ever ask. And He’s closer to you than your own breath.

So before you give up on whatever situation is on the last nerve of your heart, turn to the Lord and ask Him for help. He might not always help in the way you expect Him to, but He always has a resolution to every seemingly impossible thing we encounter. Don’t keep beating your head against the wall trying to fix it yourself – turn to the One who made you and has the answers you could never find on your own.

I promise, you’ll never find better “tech support” than Jesus.