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Backyard lighting
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Monday, June, 07, 2010
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by John Fischer
My wife lives in that playful right side of the brain that has been known to suggest it might be fun to rollerblade to work. There is no GPS system in Marti’s head that checks for a good route. She merely sees her goal and finds ways to achieve it even if they are not conventional or paved routes.
Her mind leaps and bounds in lateral jumps while mine thinks in sequential steps, each of which is justifying the next. She has no problem being wrong at some stage in order to achieve a right solution. This drives me crazy! A perfect case in point would be the lighting system we have in our back yard that she put up one weekend when I was away. After repeatedly asking me to do it, she decided to do it herself. I deserve the consequences.
Did she consider that the packages of lights she bought were left over from Christmas, and that the reason they were on sale was they blinked? Did she have a plan for how she was going get power to all these lights in the most efficient manner? No. Thoughts like this do not have a place to reside in Marti's brain. She had a goal, and, by golly, she was going to achieve it one way or another. And she did. Never mind that the other way she came up with turned out to use three times the extension cord as necessary and a totally unfathomable system of wiring that would confound the greatest mind and make a diagram of it look like spaghetti lining the tray of a 2-year-old's high chair after supper.
But the lights all work, and did I add that they all blink?
Yes, it is an electrical nightmare, especially when something goes wrong with one of the lines like it did yesterday, and I have to somehow figure out how to locate and solve the problem. "Just follow the cord to the other end; something's obviously come unplugged." Yes, I thought, but which cord, and how can I follow it when sections of it are buried under dirt and leaves, and there are two lines going in and three coming out?
As in many things we do together, her way doesn’t stand to reason, yet it makes all the sense in the world in that… well… it works. The lights are on, but did I say they blink?
One of our major discussions here in the Catch is our need to be carrying our relationship with God into the marketplace. This is something Marti does without thinking. She's just there. And while I'm building arguments and apologetics and strategies for how to accomplish this one step at a time, Marti is already in the parade making a turn on Market Street and heading down Main.
Well, the backyard lights are all on again, even if I do not know why. But did I mention that while pretty… they all blink? Marti recognizes the error as something she didn't plan on, but adds, "Don’t they remind you of fairies touching down and then taking flight?" Lord, help me… help us all embrace people who arrive at the same solution from a different perspective. And get us out of our heads, and into the world!
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