The T-120 Thread…

I sometimes wonder how many threads of life can be unwoven if we take the time to consider all the possibilities?

Yesterday I had tried to return a phone call to a radio station that I am trying to make connections with in order to start my book ministry for “Bruecke to Heaven”. I had called them earlier in the day and left a message on their recording device. Unfortunately, they tried to call me back after I had already layed down to try to get some sleep for my next night-shift. Once I got up, after not sleeping nearly enough, I tried returning their call. I kept getting a fast busy signal, meaning either their phone was off the hook or there were transmission problems with the phone connection. As I drove toward Goldston, heading for our Thursday JAM classes, after having just attempted to call the station for the fourth time, it was apparent the fast busy was not going away and that I was not going to get through; at least not today. When these road-blocks get in my way, I look at them as God intended; meaning, there is a higher purpose as to why I’m not able to do what I’m attempting to do.

For fun, I began to look at how the fast busy could have been God-created.

Having worked in telecommunications for many years, I know the technical aspects of what it takes to create the fast busy signal we hear on the phone when our call is not able to connect. The particular signal I was hearing was not a “Busy” signal, but rather, it was what we call in the industry a T-120, which means there is a network blockage or tranmission problem. As I thought about this, my mind continued to follow the thread, and how some poor engineer had possibly made a mistake and either entered the wrong information into the network equipment or made some other mistake and inadvertently caused the outage. In the industry, that’s a big deal since lots of revenue can be lost; time is money. In some cases, if the error is great enough, the engineer could lose their job.

In my thread, the error had cost the poor guy his job and he had been dismissed early from work. Disheartened and afraid to go home and tell his family that he was without a job, he headed for the local pub to drown his sorrows. A few hours later, he emerged and began to make another poor judgement and decided to drive himself home. Eventually, after swerving and running off the road since leaving the pub, he crashed headlong into a telephone pole, destroying the transformer that fed half the Tinytown, the little town in which he lived. The power instantly went off in hundreds of homes and the Tinytown elementary school.

Ms. Jones had been diligently working on her dissertation for her Masters degree in education. She had nearly completed the paper and was about to hit the “Save” button when the power went off. Her class had been taking a test while she worked and now there could be heard a collective sigh of relief from the students as the power died, darkening their classroom. Ms. Jone, overcome with frustration, stood up scooting her chair back loudly, startling some of the students who had been nearly in a trance-like state during the test. Some of the students even seemed as if they had nearly fallen asleep in the warm room. It was not uncommon for Ms. Jones to keep her room heated. She was originally from Texas and loved to keep her thermostat near 80 degrees. Today, she had the room furnace cranked up to keep the chilly spring air from freezing her feet. In addition to fighting fatigue, all of her students unknowingly had slight headaches which they believed to be from too much thinking.

“OK class,” she said with a bit of anger in her voice which was not directed at the students as much as it was at her own recent loss of effort, “Lets all put down your pencils and turn over your tests.”

There was a rustle of papers and clicks of the sounds of pencils being placed on the desks at her command. Still standing she looked outside for signs of storms or weather and only saw the brigh sunshine. “Hmmm,” she thought,”Another day of power interruption in Tinytown,” she scoffed. Ms. Jones wasn’t one to dwell upon the negative though and since it appeared the power wasn’t about to come back on anytime soon, she realized an opportunity to enjoy some beautiful spring weather and decided to take her class outside for an early recess. The students were more than overjoyed to hear of their early break and all eagerly lined up and quickly exited, following Ms. Jones out the door.

Little did they know, as they left, there had been a slow gas leak in the room. It was discovered afterward that the sluggishness and dazed feeling the students had experienced during their test time was not from the overwhelmed thought processes of testing but rather, the gas slowing poisoning their bodies. The janitor stopped by Ms. Jones room shortly after they had gone outside to catch up on some housekeeping and unfortunately created a spark when he touched a metal bucket in the closet, having shuffled his feet along the carpet to reach the door inside the classroom. The fireball that followed created an explosion that could be heard clear across Tinytown. The firestation nearby quickly dispatched trucks to the school as the remainder of the schools population, all unharmed, quickly evacuated the school to join their other classmates in a joyful afternoon long recess.

The engineer who experienced the car wreck was airlifted by Life Flight from the scene to the nearby big city hospital The chopper would quickly return to pick up the janitor who was also taken to the same emergency center. Both the engineer and janitor would survive, both with life debilating injuries. The janitor, who was also a deacon at the Tinytown Baptist church, would get to know the engineer while in the emergency room and both would share the same hospital room, each becoming life long friends. The engineer would find salvation through the janitor and his life would turn around when he began to find strength in the Lord and no longer through the bottle. Each man, the janitor and the engineer would come to realize that their lives, previously separate, had become intertwined and that both of them had inadvertently saved the lives of many others who unknowingly had been caught up in the same thread of time.

And so it goes…God weaves the thread of our lives, whether we want to believe or not.

The radio station returned my call today and I was able to answer. God once again has answered my prayers and we take another step forward in the journey.

So the thread continues…

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
– Romans 8:14

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