By Rick Breth

Just the other day, I was working on a fire sprinkler system installation in a new building. We had just filled the piping with water for the first time, and I found a small leak.

It was just a puddle about the size of my hand.

“No big deal,” I thought.

So I went and got a ladder and a flashlight for further investigation. I climbed up the ladder and began to examine the piping to see exactly what was leaking.

I found that the threads on a 1-inch pipe were leaking right at a fitting. Apparently the fitting was not tight enough. So I wiped away the water and watched to see how quickly it was leaking, and—SPLAT—another drop of water hit my hard hat from above.

“What now?” I said, shining my flashlight into the darkness above the ceiling and searching for this other leak, which just so happened to be dripping in the exact same spot on the floor as the first leak.

This new leak was too high up for me to see, so I had to go and get my extension ladder and put it up through the ceiling to the structural steel above to examine this other problem.

I had my apprentice hold the bottom of my ladder steady as I carefully scaled it about 20 feet up into the darkness to investigate. My flashlight and my eyes flashed upward.

I found a disaster just waiting to happen.

I had just found two 2½-inch pipe couplings that were just tight enough to hold the pipe together, yet just loose enough to blow apart and cause a Noah-type flood if any more water pressure had been put on the system without first tightening these forgotten fittings!

What a close call!

As I stood above the ceiling on that ladder in the darkness, I took off my hard hat and took the time to thank God for His ways and how He reveals our shortcomings and problems to us all. It made me think of a much more important life lesson.

When God reveals to us a small problem, we must examine ourselves for the cause. In this process of self-examination, God wants to help us avert a disaster by revealing a big problem in our character by first showing us a small one. Then He corrects us gently, when we listen!

Proverbs 3:11-12 say, “My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord; neither be weary of his correction: For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.”

We must always keep this process in mind and be ready and willing to go to our loving and patient Father and ask for His help.

Then those little flaws won’t turn into a disaster.