It’s not like we must be a philosopher or anything, we just need to take time and reflect about ourselves and the bigger scheme of things.

Right now in the “Zits” comic strip, they’re doing this gag about an ink outage, so what we’ve got are partially drawn characters making snide comments about the lack of ink. I totally don’t get that. I get Groucho Marx. I don’t get this.

John 12:43 came up and walloped me in the nose. In verse 42 it says that some of the Jewish leaders actually believed on Christ, but they didn’t confess it. They didn’t confess it because “they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.” This area of making a difference to people around me, taking an active part in the spiritual battle (“…our struggle is not against flesh and blood…”) has been on my mind quite a bit this summer. And then to see this little verse, it’s like it describes me.

My job is generally pretty easy, just sit back and listen to equipment run. But I’ll tell you what, it can be very, very stressful. See, what happens is sometimes the pellet mill will plug up. Sometimes all that means is the equipment will shut down, but sometimes it will squeal the belts. Talk about getting your heartbeat up, when you hear the belts howling the body goes into overdrive. So a couple days ago it plugged up on me twice. Turns out, after calling dad, that I need to do a maintenance thing (tightening the rolls). So I did that, then I started her back up. Well, the equipment up there is big and there’s a loose bearing somewhere that’s causing it to rumble and for whatever reason excess steam and/or smoke was coming out of it. So not only are my nerves on edge because of squealing belts, but this thing sounds like it could blow up any minute and stuff is pouring out of it like it’s an alchemist’s holy grail. I’m getting nervous just writing this. The story has a happy ending, things went basically smoothly the rest of the night, except for something stupid on my part. But that was relatively minor and really doesn’t add anything to this account.