Filth on a Pearl

What with the advent of the optical mouse several years ago, I'd think that all the trackballs and such in hand-held devices like my BlackBerry Pearl would have those same space-age guts. But they don't. At least, the Pearl doesn't.

I've held off on this analogy for a month or two, because I'm not too keen on the really blatant analogies -- the ones that everyone "gets" even before the point is made. I waited until I could take a slightly different angle. Here's the way it would have started out if I'd used the simple analogy:

"The trackball on my BlackBerry Pearl had gotten so that it was very difficult to scroll to the left. Actually, it had become impossible to scroll to the left. Since I'm a tinkerer, I took the thing apart to clean it myself rather than taking it to a service center.

"Sure enough, the little rollers inside the trackball assembly were all gunked up with nasty, gross, smelly crud (I sniffed it just to be sure). I carefully cleaned each roller and reassembled it. What a difference it made! I was able to freely scroll to the left again, and movement in every direction was much easier; just as if it were a new unit!"

Now, the implications of that story are so obvious that you probably knew them before you were through reading it. "When we allow God to clean away the sin in our lives, we will be refreshed and renewed." Or something like that.

However, I had to clean the assembly a second time. It'd gotten gunked up again (and you'd probably draw the same "sin accumulating in our lives" kind of implication). This time as I disassembled it, I was reminded of a saying on a coffee mug that my wife and I bought as a gift for my father-in-law several years ago: "If it ain't broke, take it apart and lose some of the pieces. Then it will be."

So I'll leave it to you to draw your own lesson away from the latest cleaning experience, which was had yesterday morning. My fingers are too large to be handling rollers (magnetic ones, at that -- the kind that keep magically zipping over to be in contact with the other ones) that are almost the size of an eyeglass screw. I was reminded of how frustrating it was the first time, trying to fix the problem myself. I eventually bent one of the clips that holds the trackball into place. Fortunately I was able to mangle it back into place, and it seems to be working, but it is broken, and I expect to have problems from it in the future.

I think that the best preventive maintenance will be to make sure that I have clean hands when I roll the trackball, in order to prevent gunky build-up. What better lead-in to this verse?

Who may climb the mountain of the Lord?
    Who may stand in his holy place?
Only those whose hands and hearts are pure,
    who do not worship idols
    and never tell lies.
They will receive the Lord’s blessing
    and have a right relationship with God their Savior.
Such people may seek You
    and worship in Your presence, O God of Jacob.
Psalm 24:3-6 (NLT)

Posted in: Sin, Thinking