Under Pressure

On Saturday I was working in my backyard getting some things cleaned up. I sprayed weeds and brushed the pool. I was getting ready to change the shoes on my pool vacuum when all of a sudden I heard an incredible boom.

I looked and the top half of my pool filter flew up in the air about 15 feet and landed 20 feet away. Then water was pouring out of the top of the filter before I could get over to shut it off.

I am not an expert on pool filters but it sure looked and sounded like there was a lot of pressure inside the filter that shouldn’t have been there and it caused it to blow.

Have you ever felt like my pool filter?  I know I have. When we experience frustrations in life, disappointments or times when things don’t seem fair the pressure mounts and we feel ready to blow up.

Someone may say an insensitive word and it just continues to grow. How do we get rid of this feeling?  Or how do we help someone else who is feeling this way?

Proverbs 12:25 tells us, “An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up.”  Our words can help diffuse the pressure someone else may be feeling.  If we can just make our words be words of building each other up we can help many people without even realizing it.

​You don’t know which people around you are feeling the pressure today; give everyone a kind word and see what happens.

-Bob Koehne