The way things work

By Jeff Becraft

There was no Friday email last Friday because the two NC grandkids came into town. If there’s no Friday email, it usually means I’m out of town or grandkids are involved somehow.

When they come to Grams & Poppi’s in the summer months, we rig up a water slide. We have this old fort in the backyard that goes all the way back to when our kids were little. It’s a fairly tall fort and it has a sliding board coming out of it. This thing is at a pretty severe angle and it has a hump in the middle. What we do is we put a little inflatable pool at the bottom, fill that with water, run the hose up over one of the cross beams of the fort, and then have water running down the slide. When the kids go down that thing, they are really hummin’. Once they hit that hump in the middle, they will usually get airborne for a moment.

While they were enjoying that, I asked Brenda, “Can you watch them for five minutes? I’m going to blow up the bigger pool,” which is this four by eight pool, and is one of those pools, you know… that you get and they last a few times and get a hole in them, and that’s about all you got. But this one has lasted a few seasons now.

So I have got this electronic air blower that plugs into the car. We used to use it when we would go camping to blow up an air mattress. I go dig it out of the garage. I go back to my car. I take out this big vinyl pool, lay it all out next to the car, start the car, stick the nozzle in… and I can’t get it to inflate. I am pushing that nozzle in there with all I’ve got and I can’t figure out why it’s not inflating? I can’t remember it ever being this hard before. And all this is happening in 97-degree weather. To say I wasn’t happy would be an understatement.

I then take a break for a little while, go to the backyard, tell Brenda it’s going to be more than five minutes… and head back towards the car and the limp pool, all while trying to regain my composure.

I look at it a little more closely… and the valve has a double valve. In other words, I was only opening up the top valve, which meant the air nozzle was never getting into the inside of the part of the pool that inflates. I was just pressing and pressing against this second trap door of the second valve.

One author states many times in a book I recently read by him: “There is a way that things work.”

How true. Obviously, sticking a nozzle against a closed opening is not going to get air inside an inflatable pool. It really didn’t matter how hard I tried.

Whether it is physics, chemistry, mechanics… or relationships… there is a way things work. When we bypass that or ignore that or simply don’t see that, we create for ourselves a very frustrating circumstance that can lead to a downward spiral.

Even though I may have made several comments about the intellectual capacity of this pool (“stupid pool”), blaming the pool or the inflator just heightened the aggravation.

It wasn’t until I realized I wasn’t doing it the right way, that I made any progress. Once I opened the second valve, the entire pool inflated in less than two minutes… and I am carrying the pool to the backyard. Puzzled, Brenda comments, “I thought you said it was going to take a long time.” “I wasn’t doing it correctly.”

So, if in life, we feel we have hit a dead-end street, perhaps we need to take a look at how we are approaching things rather than simply trying harder… or even blaming others… and getting more and more frustrated. Perhaps it is a simple thing that we may not be seeing… and missing the truth of how things work.

Jeff Becraft is the Director of Our Place of Hope located in Columbia, South Carolina, where people find encouragement to regain meaning, purpose, and hope for their lives. Jeff has dedicated much of his life to helping shift the vision of people’s lives. If you would like Jeff to speak to your group or event, you can connect with him at  [email protected].