Shade Tree Wisdom 3/8/09

Surely you’ve heard or read about “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” or “The wonderful 'one horse shay’?” Well, you can look it up in Google. The Shay is a buggy that the Deacon has built. He used only the best woods, the choicest irons and materials so it would not break down. It ran for one hundred years and then crumbled altogether.

“You see of course, if you’re not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once.
All at once, and nothing first,
Just as bubbles do when they burst.”

Holmes ends the poem with:
“End of the wonderful one-horse shay.
Logic is logic, that’s all I say”

And that’s just what happened to my computer. It stopped. The first diagnosis, power pack. That proved defective, the mother board was limping, etc, etc, so the man said, “Better to get a new one than to get it fixed. (And he was kind enough to tell me they sold computers too.) [these folks are soo helpful that way].

To the rescue came my son-in-law who had a computer. He put my hard drive into this machine and it worked just fine, so I am back in business.

It delighted me that several of you asked where I was. But the experience makes it really hard to sing that ditty which seems to be the theme song of so many. It runs like this:

"Oh, Lord, it’s hard to be humble,
When you’re perfect in every way.
I can’t wait to look in the mirror,
cause I get better looking each day.
To know me is to love me,
I must be a heck of a man.
Oh, Lord, it’s hard to be humble,
But I’m doing the best that I can.”

All it takes is an experience like that, humbled by a machine, out-classed by stuff, undone by pieces of material, held at bay by a mindless thing!

It goes to remind us that we are but dust, as Ash Wednesday reminds us, and that the Lord did say, “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return”. That is why He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into the world, to save “His people from their sins.” And that is what comes out of this experience, that God yet has a hand in my life, as He does in yours, loving, caring, nurturing, and drawing to Himself.

GPD 3/8/09