BROKEN PIPE DREAMS
by dean krippaehne
July, 2005

My wife Karin and I had been working hard scraping the tile grout off of the bathroom shower wall all day - doing a bit of self-remodeling. Unfortunately, when it came time to clean up the mess of dust and old grout that lay on the shower floor, we made the mistake of trying to simply rinse it all down the shower drain.

What's wrong with doing that - you ask? Exactly what I thought. Come to find out, the grout debris when mixed with already grimy drain pipes makes quite a cement-like glue which doesn't flush down the pipes too smoothly. That's right - we now had a cleanly stripped shower wall and one completely clogged drain.

I knew that if worse came to worse - if I had to call a plumber - it wouldn't be too horrible of an expense because the shower in question stood directly over my garage making the pipes easily accessible. But that would be too easy - I had a better idea.

Recently, I had purchased an air gun especially made for unclogging slow drain pipes. Instead of calling a plumber or using a "snake" to remedy the problem, I would simply pump up my pipe cleaning gun and force air through the drain which would unclog the pipes - at least that is the idea with the plumber's air gun.

I had used this air gun successfully a couple of times before on clogged sinks in our house so I felt comfortably confident that it would again do the trick - this time on our shower drain.

In the air gun box, I found just the right rubber fitting to attach to the drain in question and began to pump up the pressure in my air gun. 1, 2, 3 pumps - 10, 11, 12 - 20, 21, 22 pumps - I kept going. 23, 24 - the pumping became harder and harder as the pressure inside the gun grew. Twenty five, twenty -----six - I could barely get that one pushed down. Let's try for one more - I gave it my best effort - 27. "This sucker was cocked, loaded and ready" I smugly thought.

I felt certain that with as much pressure as I had pumped into the gun - one firing would be sufficient. I steadied myself and sealed the gun with it's rubber attachment over the mouth of the drain. I then turned my head slightly away, should there be any kickback, and prepared to fire.

BOOM, BANG, CRACK and then CRASH!!!!!

It sounded to me to be a bit too much of an explosive noise - with collateral damage. My wife came running down the hall shouting "are you OK - are you OK," and "What the heck was all that noise about?" I assured her that I was OK but when I looked down at the drain hole I saw to my utter surprise nothing but - light! Light is not a good think to see when looking down what is supposed to be the dark hole of a pipe. Further inspection of the sight reveled that I had blown a three foot section of pipe clean off of it's fastenings and onto the garage floor below - where it lay - dead.

When my wife asked me what happened I simply replied "the drain is no longer clogged," trying to cover up my stupid-human-trick with as much macho bravado as my embarrassed ego could muster. (as if I had planned to blow a section of pipe through the bathroom floor.)

A plumber, a few hundred dollars and a day later had everything as good as new.

We all make mistakes sometimes don't we. Sometimes, like my blown bathroom pipes - our mistakes are a bit humorous. Other times in life our mistakes aren't funny at all. Nevertheless, it is a forgone conclusion that we are all going to make some mistakes, big and small in our lives. We are all going to have a few "missteps" along our paths. The question for us is not "are we going to have some goof-ups" in our walk - but rather "who are we going to take with us on our life's road? Who are we going to walk with." Who will be there to catch us as we stumble, or to pick us up when we fall? That is the daily question for each of us. May I submit that the best answer to the question of "who" is Jesus Christ. He will be there to help us through all of our big and little - stupid-human-tricks.

Romans 3:23
"for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"

Romans 3:24
"and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."

1 John 1:7
"But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin."