Last night I was installing a lock for a customer when I had help from God.
They had given me an old lock that they had taken off of their front door asked me to install it on the back door. The back door already had a (broken) lock, so it was just a matter of swapping the broken one for the good one. Normally it’s a quick job, but this lock was giving me trouble. I just couldn’t get it to work properly. Either the inside part worked, or the outside part, but they wouldn’t both work at the same time. After fiddling with it for a half hour, I was ready to give up. My hand was hurting from holding the two halves of the lock together around the edge of the door, and I had run out of ideas. The quote from Einstein that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” was running through my head.
I figured I would leave the working lock in the door to cover the holes and go tell them that it was beyond my skill level. As I tightened the screws that held the lock in place, I thought that a believer might be praying for God’s help at this point. How nice it would be if there was a God to reach down for me and miraculously make the lock work! Once the lock was in place, I decided to try it one more time, on the off chance that I’d finally gotten it right. Surprisingly, it worked!
So, did I get help from God? Or is it just a coincidence: as a result of the culture I grew up in and my penchant for theological musings, I happened to be thinking about God miraculously helping me just before I accidentally got the lock’s mechanism in the right configuration?
On the one hand, were someone to tell me that they base their religious beliefs on experiences like the one above, I would dismiss it as ridiculously weak. We are conditioned to appeal to God in nearly every situation. Inevitably some of the time things will happen to work out, and it will be attributed to God. On the other hand, an experience like this one is pretty powerful. I can see why a believer would see discounting it as perverse. Logic is one thing; direct experience is another. For someone who is used to seeing the Divine in the world (and who isn’t inclined to philosophically examine every event in their lives), it seems obvious that only a terribly misguided or evil person would ignore such direct experiential evidence of God.
I had the same experience last week with a light fixture and with my iPad's speaker. Amazing!
ReplyDeleteIt's uncanny:
Deletehttp://yeshivaforum.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/rediscovering-prayer/
reminds me of a 700 club fundraiser i was watching
ReplyDeletethey interviewed these africans that were fortunate enough to receive some supplies and fresh water, etc. to their tiny village. They praised jesus over and over again for giving them the water and supplies!!
these were poor, in the midst of disease and starvation, yet the 700 club brought them these things, BECASUE of their belief in jesus, presumably. I guess jesus doesnt care about the village down the street that is on the verge of collapse and death....even though they "believe" in him.
if you couldnt figure out the lock, it was "gam zu letovah" for reasons we just cant understand
ksil
ksil - I felt the same way when the Chilean miners were rescued thanks to really extraordinary scientific accomplishments, and God got all the credit. When a month or so later the miners 29 miners in New Zealand died, God was nowhere to be found.
ReplyDeleteG*3,
ReplyDeleteHow did you miss this?
http://praxyproject.blogspot.com/2012/01/psychology-of-religious-intuitions_11.html
A story is told of Richard Feynman, who would walk up to some stranger on the street and say, "guess what happened to me today?". The poor shmuck would say "what?", and Feynman would answer "nothing!".
ReplyDeleteIts a nice way of illustrating serendipity.
"They had given me an old lock that they had taken off of their front door asked me to install it on the back door. The back door already had a (broken) lock, so it was just a matter of swapping the broken one for the good one. Normally it’s a quick job, but this lock was giving me trouble. I just couldn’t get it to work properly. Either the inside part worked, or the outside part, but they wouldn’t both work at the same time. After fiddling with it for a half hour, I was ready to give up. My hand was hurting from holding the two halves of the lock together around the edge of the door, and I had run out of ideas. The quote from Einstein that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” was running through my head."
ReplyDeleteThe Second Son: God the Locksmith:
God the Locksmith