It’s amazing how much we don’t know. The older I get the more I learn that I have a lot to learn. I’m awed by the amount of knowledge there is and how much access we have to it. You can pick a genre and get on YouTube to watch videos about anything. My son calls it YouTube university. There are books on almost any subject you want to study. You can get on “the Google” as my mom calls it and find information on anything.
What you don’t know can keep you from acting on the right thing. It can render you powerless. Not because you’re bad or don’t care. You just don’t know. There are excuses and there are reasons. Excuses are things we use to not take action when we should and we know we should and everyone around us knows we should. Everyone can identify an excuse. But then there are reasons. One of the reasons we don’t act is that we don’t know. But, in this day of knowledge, there is almost nothing you can’t find out.
My furnace stopped working one day in the middle of winter. We had just babysat for a couple of our grandkids and had a really good time with them. We played games and did an art project just kind of hanging around with them. When they left, I noticed that it was getting cold in the house. I checked the thermostat and it simply wasn’t talking to the furnace. In the middle of winter you don’t hesitate to call the heating and air-conditioning repair company to come and fix it.
I called them and they said they would be right out. It only took them an hour or so to get to my house and the repairman started immediately. He was in the room where our furnace is and almost instantaneously the furnace ignited. I was dumbfounded. He called me in and showed me a relay switch on the outside of the furnace. It had been turned off and rendered the furnace powerless. One of our grandkids had reached into the furnace compartment and switched the furnace off.
The thing was I didn’t even know that switch existed. The furnace guy was very gracious and told me, “I won’t charge you for this…It will be our little secret.”.
About two weeks later the exact same scenario took place. The grandkids were at my house and the furnace quit working, but I knew exactly what to do. I looked in the furnace compartment and sure enough the same switch had been turned off. (I never did figure out which kid was turning it off.) I just reached in, based on the new knowledge I’d gained, and turned the furnace back on. No call to the repairman, I just took my own action.
There is a DIY (Do it yourself) movement in the US. People are learning that most problems are an easy fix with the right knowledge which they can get in a multitude of places. It eliminates excuses and ignorance.
The Bible says; “My people are rendered powerless because of a lack of knowledge.” People are stopped because they don’t know. And…now you know that you don’t know. The things that normally hurt you the most are the things you don’t see coming. You don’t know they are coming. Go on a journey of finding things out. The whole world of knowledge is at your finger tips.
Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash
