Yesterday’s lesson came to me before I’d even had my first cup of coffee.
I woke up and the house was freezing. Now, there are some things around the house I know how to fix. A leaky faucet doesn’t intimidate me. I can replace an electrical outlet without too much drama. A clogged drain? Most of the time I can handle that too. But troubleshooting a heating unit? That’s out of my league.
Still, I had what I thought was a moment of brilliance. I wondered if maybe flipping the breaker off and back on might reset the system. So I went out into my garage to access the panel, switched it off, waited a moment, flipped it back on. Sure enough, the heat kicked in! I may have even felt a little proud of myself.
But by five o’clock that evening, the house felt cool again. I checked the thermostat. It was set on 70°, but the inside temperature read 58°. Evidently, I’m not as “brilliant” as I initially thought. So we spent another cold night huddled under blankets while a little space heater did its best to keep up.
Well… this morning the heating contractor came out. He replaced a few parts, ran some tests, and got the system working fine again. But as he was packing up, he said, “I noticed something else. Your fuel pressure is low. So either you’re almost out of heating fuel, or you’ve got a problem with the fuel regulator. That’s something your fuel company will have to address.” My tank was just filled a few weeks ago, and my meter shows it’s half-full.
So now someone else is coming tomorrow from the gas company.
And I couldn’t help but think—this is a lot like life.
One day everything seems fine. Then out of the blue, something stops working. A relationship grows cold. Peace disappears. Joy seems to flicker out. We scramble to fix what we can see. We reset a breaker. We adjust the thermostat. And sometimes those quick fixes even seem to help—for a while.
But then the chill returns.
And if we’re honest, what we’re often facing on the surface isn’t the whole story. There’s something deeper going on beneath the visible problem.
The Scriptures speak to this with remarkable clarity. In Jeremiah 2:13, the Lord says, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” In other words, the dryness and emptiness people were experiencing wasn’t merely circumstantial. It wasn’t just political instability or economic strain. The deeper issue was relational—they had turned from the very Source of life.
We tend to focus on the cold house. But God gently points us to the fuel supply.
We wrestle with anxiety, irritability, restlessness, or discouragement, and we try to manage the symptoms. We flip breakers by starting new routines. Or setting new goals. Or finding new distractions. But sometimes the real issue is that our communion with the Lord has grown thin. The “pressure” is low. The flame can’t burn as it should because the supply line has been neglected.
Or as James 4:8 puts it so simply and tenderly, “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” The promise isn’t that every circumstance will instantly change, but that the warmth of His presence will.
What struck me this morning was this: I needed more than a simple reset. I needed someone qualified to deal with what was really wrong. And spiritually speaking, that’s true for all of us. We can’t repair our own souls by clever adjustments. We need the Lord to search us, to reveal what’s beneath the surface, and to restore what’s running low.
So… if you’re “feeling cold” today, it might be worth asking, “Lord, is there something deeper You’re wanting to address in me? Is my fellowship with You as full and steady as it should be?”
Because when the fuel line is right, when the supply is steady, the warmth returns—not manufactured, not forced, but flowing from the Source Himself.
Former Blackout Artist 