Breakdown

Over the past few months it seems like everything around me is breaking down:

-          The back door of the house had water damage and will have to be replaced.

-          The fence post on the gate rusted at the bottom and is falling over.

-          The HVAC on the rental house went out.

-          My favorite chair, the one in the bedroom broke.

-          The car's ignition switch broke and had to be replaced and the transmission fluid leaked.

-          The LCD display on this laptop computer started getting permanent vertical lines and was getting almost too dim to read.

-          And then, on top of all that, I dislocated something down there in my hip area and could hardly walk for a few days.

Everything breaks down. Everything gets old. Everything wears out.

(And I have this psychological need to fix things rather than replace them.)

It’s a spiritual thing, too. When man went wrong, God could have just said, "That's it; it was a mistake; throw it all away." But then Satan would be right. So the thing is God says, "I can fix it."

He found a man, Noah, and started over. He found another, Job, and said, "What about him?" He found another, Abraham and made him the patriarch of an oracle people. He found a man, Moses, and showed how he could redeem a people enslaved and broken. And He sent His son, Jesus, and brought something into the world to fix, repair, and regenerate the broken spirit of man.

And He has done so – although the finality and reality of the fix is not yet apparent in this temporal, entropic, physical place. You have to see with spiritual eyes to see it. What we see in the now is broken, but when we see God's working-out over eternity, there is hope.

'Cuz the fix is in.

So when you see the breakdown of "stuff" (things, societies, economies, and so on) see the metaphor with spiritual eyes and understand: man breaks it; God fixes it.