Posted By: revmaddog1948
Posted On: 21:57:54 12th May 2010God was intervening on my visual sales pitch. He turned the spotlight away from the glass case, and turned it on a dingy gray locker.
I was longing to go back to pastoring full time. I knew the importance of persistence in prayer, and I also knew the great freedom God gives all believers to ask for the impossible. I had set up the perfect arena in my soul for a sales pitch to God. I was going to use the incredible powers of persuasion that He Himself had given me, and use them in persuading God.
He had already intervened once in my flawless presentation. Before I barely got started, He stopped me, for I had actually been chiding Him about not answering my prayers when He had answered so many prayers before. He took me back to an almost forgotten prayer made thirty years before. I had told Him very specifically that I would pastor any church, no matter how small, and to support my family while I pastored this church, I told Him, and I am quoting, “I will work any job, no matter how dirty, or hot, or how much pressure there is!”, IF He would keep my family together, and all of them in the Kingdom.
I work for a company called Standard Motors, which purchased our particular manufacturing facility about 5 years ago. We were originally known as Ristance, and we make spark plug wire, lots and lots of spark plug wire, for the spark plugs underneath the hood of your auto. We make around 15 million feet of spark plug wire every month. We also manufacture our own conductive core, and our own inner wire, for spark plug wire has a double jacket. This double jacket insures the integrity of the wire. If one layer fails to insulate, the second layer is a back up.
So in reality, every month we make 45 million feet of wire, 15 million of which goes out the door to customers.
If a facility ships 95% on time, it is considered an outstanding facility. We consistently ship 98 to 99%. We have the same attendance problems and the same machine downtime as any other facility, but we have a much higher ship on time rate, because our factory is in reality a wolf pack, where every body works together like a dog sled, or the lead dog will take a bite out of your fanny.
My job on third shift is called the towers. The towers are 20 foot tall ovens, with an average temperature of 800 degrees. There are fourteen of these toasty babies in my area.
In our plant, there are also 5 CV lines. CV stands for continuous vulcanization, which is a fancy way of saying a 400 foot long steam tube down which uncured wire travels at 300 to 600 feet per minute. Basic physics tells you that steam is hotter than 212 degrees. 300 pounds of pressure insures that when ever a line is shut down and opened up, there is plenty of humidity, which in our building runs around 95%. If it were 100%, it would be raining.
My job is to fill the pans at the bottom of the towers with a liquefied carbon solution. Carbon is the same stuff coal is made of, and also charcoal. The black stuff seems to leap off the machines when you walk by, so that if we don’t constantly wash up and wear gloves, the tower operators would look like coal miners. I wear all black to work, so that I don’t look like a painting when I come home.
To sum it all up, I work in one of the hottest, dirtiest, and pressure filled jobs of this millennium.
God reminded me of my word for word prayer, and then took me in my self made vision to our Sunday service, followed by our Sunday family dinner. He gently showed me that He had kept His end of the bargain, for both of my adult daughters had married and settled within a few miles. They had both married fine Catholic men, who both stated to me personally that they had confessed Jesus as their Savior when they were young. Every Sunday, unless they were working, they and their wives, and their children were all in church, my church, and then came over for Sunday dinner. God had given me, to the tee, exactly what I had asked for.
Still I pressed on. I showed God the glass case, the fiery field, the broken families, the three piece full time minister’s suit in side the glass case, complete with shining lights and a hammer marked IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS! I was on a roll! I thought I had God cornered, ready to sign on the dotted line!
Then God took over my vision again. Now there was a solitary light shining on a dingy gray locker, exactly like the locker at work. The door popped open, and inside I could see my work clothes, black and dirty, and my extra dirty boots. At the bottom of the narrow locker there was a small, pure white box, wrapped in a blood red ribbon. The wrapping and the ribbon came off. The box slowly opened. Inside I could see a small white paper with writing on it. I read the note.
You can pray for rain!
Suddenly my whole life made sense! For 35 years God had been leading me step by step through a life long object lesson. Two times, in two different states, farmers had asked me to pray for rain during a drought. Both of them made me keep at it until the drought was broken. Then, since in their thinking I had the inside track, people started asking our church to pray for picnics, weddings, and reunions, that it would NOT rain. God would answer to the minute. One boy prayed for a boatload of snow. We got 24 inches in 24 hours. One time it rained on one side of a small town, and stayed dry on the other side for AN HOUR!, till the end of my daughter’s garage sale.
All my life, I have been frustrated with follow up, lack of time, unskilled helpers, overwhelming multiple family problems in the lives of those around me, even when I had been a full time pastor. More training and more workers never seemed to be enough. But now I understood what the answer was. I understood what the rain stood for.
The rain that God wanted me to pray for was GRACE!
All of this time I had thought that God was ignoring me, He was leading me step by step on an incredible journey, an almost unbelievable journey, simple to teach me to not to rely on my skills, but instead to rely on Him, and to pray for grace.
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