Load Paper

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.