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Friday, November 6, 2015

It Goes If You Push It

Years ago, when I worked for Bigelow-Sanford (carpet manufacturing) in Greenville, S.C., I asked a thin, hard-working lady who headed up projects in Bigelow’s pilot plant, “How’s it going?”

She looked at me through glasses perched on her narrow nose. She raised a lighted cigarette to her thin lips, took a draw, expelled some smoke, and said, “It goes if you push it.”

She was/is right, in lots of ways. How things “go” often involve how we “push.”

Some things happen that we don’t control, but many things depend on our “push” in order to get stuff moving in a right direction.

Take me, for example: I stayed up late last night and woke up, today, around six a.m. but decided I needed more sleep. When I woke up around nine a.m., I felt as though I was in a fog. I seemed addled. I had been sleeping, as they say, like a log. I guess a log is heavy and lies pretty still in the forest.


As I lay on my bed, I thought, “I need to sit up, stand up, and head to the bathroom. I just can’t lie here and ‘think’ myself ready.” I have a body and can’t live just in my mind, or not much will get done.

The Bible indicates that humans are each made up of a body, a soul, and a spirit. Someone said that if any two of those components agree about doing something, each person will do the thing the prevailing two components agree on.

That idea seems to be a takeoff on some words that Jesus said, recorded in this verse:

“Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 18:19 NASB).

OK, so I was lying in the bed, and I said to myself, “I need to get up.”

My spirit and soul agreed that I needed to get up, but my body was sassing back, saying, “No, I want to lie here in this nice bed. Leave me alone. Wa-a-a, wa-a-a.”

My spirit and soul agreed about rising from the bed, though my soul seemed a little weak and wanted to side with my body. My old body started moving but was whining, “No, no, I don’t wanna go!”

So, here I am, sitting at my computer. My body is still whining a good bit, but it’s under control, I reckon, for the time being.