It has been a crazy week as I am down to single digits on my
calendar before I head to Eldoret, Kenya to speak at a conference of about 300 pastors. I am very excited about doing this.
I am also working on preparing materials for my
presentations and preparing worship bulletins and children’s bulletins for use on
the home front while I am away. For the past several days I have been greeted repeatedly
with the same words by my printer and my copier.
LOAD PAPER
At some point, I started to feel a little burdened about continually
having to reload the paper tray. Then
late on Friday night following a somewhat exhausting but very productive fund
raiser for this mission trip, I loaded a congregational survey that the Board
of Missions asked us to complete. It was
9 pages long and would take a while. It
could do its work overnight.
Just as I was ready to exit the church building, I noticed
that the copier noise that I had grown to know so well over the past few days
was absent.
I investigated, knowing full well that I had loaded the
paper, but wondering if I had repeated that drill so many times that I just
thought I had loaded it. There was only one
way to find out. I reentered the copy
room and was greeted with the message:
CARRIAGE JAM
It couldn't be, but it was.
I have cleared a few jams before and they always involved placing big
hands through small openings to remove even smaller bits of paper that somehow
register on the machine’s sensor network and tell the device to cease all
operations.
It wasn't he worst of jams, but when you have been poured
out like a drink offering and can hardly wait for God and a good night’s rest
to fill you back up; it was surely the last thing I wanted to do.
The following day, I resumed my copying frenzy and sure
enough, the machine demanded more paper several times that day.
With each LOAD PAPER command that the machine issued to me,
I responded with Hallelujah!
Load paper meant that everything was working fine. Nothing was broken or malfunctioning. All was proceeding along the course set for
me.
It is hard to see how I could have ever seen such a simple
task as a burden when it was really a blessing.