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New Christmas Lights Have Been A Challenge

Bringing something up to a new standard always presents its challenges.

new Christmas lights have been a challenge

It doesn’t matter what it is, upgrading or moving to a new system is never smooth, such as going from analogue to digital – it’s a process. 

I was looking at a number of home movies we shot years ago when our kids were little. I had brought home the big, massive VHS video camera from the church, plunked a regular-sized VHS tape into the unit and shot birthday and Christmas events.  

… That was great while VHS players were a thing. Now VHS tapes and players are a thing of the past. 

The change in technology makes it difficult to save those memories for the future. I’ve almost lost the window to transfer those tapes to a digital format. But I still have a VHS player and I think one of my old video cameras can be plugged into it to transfer the recordings to digital.

I remember upgrading how I wrote sermons, from pen and paper to typing them onto my computer. I’ll admit I sometimes had a hard time reading my own writing. 

But when I forgot to hit “save” and my computer crashed, sometimes I lost pages of type … and you can’t even try to decipher what isn’t there anymore.

I learned the painful lesson that you should hit the save button every time you pause to make sure you don’t lose anything.

Well, last week I tried a new upgrade with our Christmas lights. 

I’ve been forever using the same strings of lights to give a Christmas feel to the outside of our home. But now our incandescent strings of lights are wearing out. Some of the sockets no longer work and lightbulbs are always going out.

I decided to go LED all the way. 

I headed to the store thinking it would be seamless to replace the four strings of lights I put on our house, only to find that the new strings are not 25 feet long like the old ones. They are 16.1 feet long.

My quick trip to the hardware store turned into a half hour of humming and hawing over what strings to buy. 

I also had to buy all new clips to attach them to our house.

I ended up getting five strings, but two of them had five colours of lights when I only wanted two. It took some time to swap out the colours I didn’t want.

When I finally got them all up, one string didn’t work. Sure enough, it was one of the multi-coloured strings. I had to switch the lights back to the originals and return them to the store. 

The new set I bought worked when I got them home but, by the time I’d swapped the lights out, the string didn’t work. I took that set back too, plus the other matching set that had multi-coloured lights. 

The time I spent on this project was as much time as I’ve spent over the last three years putting up and taking down lights. 

It’s all good now … but the updating was a royal pain. 

Here’s the thing: It’s never easy to make changes to your life. But if you don’t, at some point you will be unable to make changes or you might think it’s too hard and miss out. Jesus came to earth to pay for your sins and enable you to have a relationship with God, now and forever. Yes, the change may cause some challenges but, in the end, giving your life to Christ will be far better for you. 

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What do you need to update or upgrade this Christmas? Leave your comments and questions below.

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Why Comparing Will Result In Renting A Storage Unit

This morning my wife went for a walk. When she returned, she commented on how many garage sales were happening in our neighbourhood.

moms-storage-unit

I casually asked her if she saw anything she wanted and she quickly responded with, “Look around! We could have five garage sales with all the stuff we have here! What do we need with more?!”

That statement stuck with me. I don’t usually think we have a lot. In fact, compared to other people, we don’t have that much. … But that’s the problem right there!

That’s why there are so many garage sales. That’s why most homes in North America could have a garage sale every week.

We compare. And when we compare, we often compare with those who have more, not less.

So compared to the guy down the street, I don’t have all that he has … so yes, I do need a riding lawnmower.

However, if we didn’t compare ourselves to others, if we just evaluated our own situations in terms of what we needed, we probably wouldn’t be checking out garage sales – we would be hosting them.

Most of us collect things. We need storage bins and closets and lockers and garages to house all the stuff we collect. Many people can’t park their car(s) in their garages because they’re too full of their things.

They might not use those things any more, but they have them just in case.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have a garage. In winter we would have to brush the snow off the car and scrape the windows. Since I’ve been a homeowner, we’ve had garages and I have been determined to use those garages for my cars.

That alone has kept us from collecting a few things we didn’t need. When in doubt, we’ve always asked, “Where would we put that?”, and the garage is always off limits.

Self Storage in the U.S. is a six billion dollar business, and we’ve all seen the kinds of useless junk that people put in them from shows like “Storage Wars” and “Auction Hunters”.

There is another factor that adds to this problem and it’s that we don’t just want more, we want new. We compare what we have with the latest styles or colours or trends. We feel we need to update our stuff.

We just put the old into storage – like my tie collection … Who knows? Maybe my fat, colourful Fred Flintstone tie will come back into fashion … Was it ever in fashion?

So we go to garage sales and we have garage sales because, when we compare, we need more and the old stuff we have needs to be replaced with the latest stuff.

Who’s in control here? Certainly not us.

… Maybe we need to make a trip to Bibles for Missions with a load or two of stuff.

Here’s the thing: When we compare, we usually compare against something better or new and we always come out on the losing end, causing us to want more or feel we need to update. Spiritually, we compare ourselves against the Bible, against God’s standards. And unlike the comparisons we do in our society where the targets are always changing, God’s standard stays the same. So stick to God’s standard, and you won’t collect excess baggage or be mesmerized by the trends.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: How much stuff could you contribute to a garage sale or a store like Bibles for Missions? Leave your comment below.