Minutes of Meetings with God
and with Myself

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In Bits and Pieces ...

Pieces of clothes dryer were leaning here and there around the base of the machine. I was feeling, "They don't make things the way they used to." After only 18 years, our clothes dryer gave out on us. The machine had worked week after week without any breakdowns or anything, no need for repairs, then, suddenly, it broke. I had done a big load of my clothes earlier in the day with no problem and everything was fine. But then, my wife had put in just a few light things and the dryer simply wouldn't work. It made some noise (not the reassuring rumble of clothes tumbling inside), but it wouldn't do anything else. I will admit that I was afraid that the machine had given up the ghost, completely.

I didn't want to call a repair man if the problem was something easy that I could fix. Well, the process of troubleshooting began. First, I checked to make sure that the machine was still plugged in (it was!!! and I almost called the repair man right then). Next, I got my trusty electric screwdriver and off came the back of the dryer. As each screw and part was removed, I laid it carefully in an order that would let me get the whole "she-bang" back together. There have been too many occasions when I did a really good job of getting things apart only to find myself lost and clueless when it was time to reassemble stuff. Thankfully, there were only 5 screws, and the only part that could come off was the back of the dryer, itself. Most of the dryer's wiring harness could be seen from the machine=s open back and there were no lose connections or burnt wires.

Unfortunately, there was no easy way to check the dryer's motor or the main dryer belt from the back. I tried standing on my head between the wall and the machine to see as deeply as possible into the bowels of the dryer, but that didn't work. I did discover that a lot of dust and lint can collect in the bottom of a dryer in 18 years. I reinstalled the machine's back and the 5 screws that held it on (a real accomplishment for a technologically challenged person like me).

Things started to get hairy at this point. It was clear that the top of the dryer was going to have to come up so I could look under it. Carefully, so I wouldn't break or scratch anything, I used a small pry bar to lift the dryer top. The top popped up... no major damage done (Thank God!!! ... sometime I'll have to tell you about a disastrous valve job I did on car back in 1973). It was plain to see that there was no belt around the dryer drum. Now, we clearly knew at least a big part of the problem.

A friend had told me that a broken dryer belt can be "the problem" or it can be a symptom of a bad dryer drum or a bad motor. I had concluded that, deciding whether to call the repairman to come or to just go buy a whole new clothes dryer, would depend on whether the problem was just the belt or not. The dryer drum was easy to check. A push with my hand sent it spinning around without any grinding or catching.

The motor was a different story. The front of the dryer had to come off to check that. The front of the machine, at first, seemed easier to remove than the back. There were only two screws. Out came the first screw, out came the second screw, the front of the dryer moved out slightly and "wham" the dryer drum fell on top of the dryer motor.

After recovering from a near heart attack, I leaned the dryer front along the side of the machine. Thankfully, I keep a brick in our utility room for just such emergencies, and I used the brick to hold up the front of the dryer drum while I looked underneath. The broken belt was curled like a snake near the dryer motor.

The motor wasn't burnt and it turned freely when I spun it. That was a relief. I was almost convinced that I wouldn't even have to call a repairman and I could just replace the belt myself when I noticed the idler arm and pulley that keeps tension on the belt had been thrown all the way to the back of the dryer when the belt broke.

The big question was: "Where does the idler arm and pulley fit in the scheme of how this dryer goes together?" There were at least two places that the gizmo could fit. I couldn't find any model number or other information on the machine (some have a little diagram that shows how stuff works).

I had no notion of how that idler arm should be positioned when installing the new dryer belt. To install it wrong would just break another belt and, this time, maybe "cook" the dryer motor. I didn't want to make more problems for myself, so I decided it was time to phone the repair man. He arrived a few hours later (talk about miracles!).

The repair man looked over the dryer, graciously refused to make fun of the brick holding up the dryer drum, repositioned the idler arm, installed a new belt and put the front back on the machine, dropped the top and the whole thing worked... good for another 18 years and at a price a whole lot less expensive than a new clothes dryer!!!

While all of this was going on with the dryer, I found myself thinking about God, life and the Church. It seems pretty evident that something, somewhere is broke, either in our relationship with God, in how our life (as a world, as a nation, as a community, as a family, as a person) is right now, or in how the Church (in the broadest sense of "Church" as well as in the narrower sense of our United Methodist Church and The Detroit Annual Conference) lives its witness and does its business.

We may be hearing some noise, but it is not the reassuring rumble of things working the way they are supposed to work. Now, a number of forces and reasons (I suspect that the biggest one is our culture's current and pervasive "consumer mentality"), strongly tempt us to just dump what we have and "go get a new one!!!"A bit too quickly, a bit too frantically, we shop for a "God" that suits us, for a "new" life that fits us better, for a church that "agrees" with us.

It seems that we jump into this "shopping" mode before we check to see if everything is even plugged in right. We don't "take the back off" to check the wiring and see whether things are still connected. Too often we would rather "just get a new one" than face all the years of dust and lint that have accumulated and we will have to clean up to find the real problem. We don't want to ask the questions: "What's really going on here? What specifically isn't working the way it was designed and intended to work? Is this worth saving? Can this still do the job?"

The "old" God still works. God is not like us. Simply because this world isn't working the way it was intended, God hasn't thrown it, or us, away in order to "just get a new one." Jesus is God's way of coming to find out what is real the problem, proving we're worth saving, showing that, by grace, we can still do the job.