Hello RedStaters, and Thank God Its’ Friday!  May this Water Cooler find you at peace and with a healthy sense of perspective as the world turns.  Just like last week, a worldly drama plays out around us, with examples of human achievement and failure; self sacrifice, and evil.  Same stuff, different week.  Such it has been, and such it will be until our God wraps this up.  Just like last week, our salvation is not in the works of men, or in our governments, or in our systems.  Our salvation will come only from our turning to the One who has the power to remake us and clean up the mess that we have made doing it our way, versus His.  Just like last week, we have the opportunity to look to Him for our salvation, or look elsewhere.  Just like last week, this is an individual choice that each of us must make.  What plays on around us is just showing us reflections of both our individual choices and the aggregate results thereof.

What can we do?  Each of us has fallen short of the holiness of our God.  We need to turn from our ways, and to His ways, putting our faith in the only One who ever earned it.  And then as God remakes our hearts, we can consider how we can best help turn our neighbors, friends, and nation to Him as well.  Remember John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

We can only sustain freedoms to the degree that we are that people.  To the degree that we are not that people, we will continue to lose freedom.

And now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGK8IC-bGnU

Cool Invention of the Week

By now you have seen my interest in weird machines, inventions, solutions.  From the mechanical realm comes the “self winding” or “automatic” watch.  The solution is over 200 years old.  Actually close to the same age as the US.  Would it be stereotypical to think that the invention is Swiss?  Well.  It was.  Per wikipedia:

The earliest credible evidence for a successful design is the watch made by the Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Perrelet, who lived in Le Locle. In late 1776 or early 1777, he invented a self-winding mechanism for pocket watches using an oscillating weight inside the watch that moved up and down.

Our inventor is quite the self-starter [also wikipedia]:

At the age of twenty years he gave up his modest work to learn watchmaking. After an apprenticeship of fifteen days at one named Prince, in Le Locle, who worked little and very badly, and where he learnt absolutely nothing, he started to work independently and so became his own master.

Opening

The Water Cooler is always an Open Thread.  What’s on your mind today?  God bless!

Mike

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