John Cowart, King Of The Geriatric Geeks!

Last night, I lay back in my recliner eating a grilled cheese sandwich with pickle and flipping the tv remote back and forth between a concert by violinist Andre Rieu and a pre-season Jaguars football game.

Who says I ain’t got no couth nor culture?

Anyhow as I watched fiddling and football, I experienced a revelation.

Back on August 2^nd I wrote about how God reveals the obvious; back on July 13^th, I wrote about problems with printer proof pages (Not the Ward Diary this time, another manuscript I've been working on at the same time).

Well, my work with those pages hit a big time glitch; I cannot progress without this step. I thought I’d have to place the whole project in the appropriate receptacle:

To get around this glitch, I needed to convert a 504-page document into a different format.

For weeks I couldn’t do it.

That heathen manuscript just would not convert. No mater what I did, it just would not convert. I’d get error messages or a blank screen whichever technique I used. I struggled with this stupid thing, trying this and that and the other for days and days and days.

I called Donald and Helen, both expert computer geeks who usually solve my computer problems in a jiffy, but they were no help at all this time.

I finagled that manuscript.

I manipulated.

I cajoled.

I cursed.

I prayed…

And, last night as I cried at the concert and yelled at the quarterback, I saw the light. In the middle of a car commercial, I envisioned my own computer screen. There on that easy-to-ignore toolbar at the top of the screen, on the far right-hand side is the word Help.

I left concert and quarterback, came out to my computer desk, clicked on that word, and read the pop-up instructions.

Guess what?

Those instructions gave three ways to convert a file; I knew about one and two. I’d tried them again and again with variations. But method number three never occurred to me.

It worked.

My file is converted.

In seconds!

Smooth as peaches through a goose, my file converted!

My point?

When struggling long and hard with a knotty problem which defies solution, ask God to reveal the obvious and see what happens.

And, don’t forget to be thankful when it does.