Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The breath of God produces ice, and the broad waters become frozen.

• Job 37:10

From whose womb comes the ice?
    Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
when the waters become hard as stone,
    when the surface of the deep is frozen?

• Job 38:29-30

Our new ice maker is a marvel.

I wrote about how my wife’s iron-poor anemia that has led to a strange side effect.  They call it Pica, an uncontrollable obsession to eat ice.  I got her the ice maker in that it makes small, bullet-shaped ice cubes that are reasonably soft.

She has had her teeth checked since the obsession started.  Her teeth are strong, but a couple of fillings have come out.  We already have those fixes scheduled.

I also wrote about the ice maker when I wrote about cavitation and how Bruce Malone, an accomplished chemical engineer, explained how cavitation was part of the process of rearranging the earth during Noah’s flood.  Our ice maker has a sensor to prevent cavitation when the water level is too low, but it has failed to work on a couple of occasions.

And that brings me to my point, a short one today.

The ice maker is a batch process, but it runs continuously until you make it stop.

But being a chemical engineer myself, I have worked on batch processes and continuous processes.  Batch processes have a beginning and an end.  Continuous processes keep going.  They can’t be both.  Or can they?

While I was napping in the recliner while supposedly watching a hockey game, I realized how these two systems both applied to the ice maker.  The ice maker has two automatic stop functions.  When the water level low alarm is activated (when it works), the system shuts down until the human fixes the problem by pouring water into the reservoir.  But if you never remove the ice from the basket, it becomes a continuous process, a wasteful and useless continuous process, but a continuous one.  The ice fills until the light from the little laser is not detected by the sensor.  The maker shuts off, which means that the maker is no longer keeping the water cold.  The ice in the basket will melt, dripping down into the reservoir.  When enough ice has melted for the laser to shine its light to the sensor, the ice maker turns back on.  The ice maker will continuously make ice until the sensor does not “see the light.”  This cycle of making ice and then melting ice, turns the ice in the basket into a mass of very hard ice with all the little bullets glued together.  It becomes “ice pick time.”

If the human does not intervene, it keeps working, but you waste the electricity continuously making and melting ice, and what you get is not that appealing.

Is that not the way we are?  When we ignore God for any length of time, we waste our energies and what we end up with will be less than what we should have gotten.  We will not think our end result is all that appealing.  God did not fall asleep on the recliner.  He did not intervene.  We must realize that we have not been attentive to Him.

You see, we are just like the ice maker.  We are a batch process.  We have a beginning, and we will have an end.  In small batches, we work hard and rest; we eat and drink and then we void the unnecessary stuff; we make an income, and we spend that income.  But we have a soul that will live forever.  Our soul is continuous.  If we do not nourish our soul by keeping our eyes on Jesus, reading His Holy Word, and praying to Him continuously, then should we not know that the outcome will be less than what we could have had?

Read the Bible.  Pray. And keep your eyes on Jesus.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.