I have a love-hate relationship with garage door openers. Specifically the kind that Ford builds into their vehicles. If you own a Ford, you know what I’m talking about. It’s the three buttons that are virtually impossible to program. If you are one of those mavericks that never has problems getting these things to work, leave your snarky comments alone and don’t talk to me. I can’t ever get it to work right. And I have almost always exclusively driven a Ford.
These buttons taunt me. They laugh at my ineptitude. They reveal my lack of patience and they revel in upsetting me. It is the one thing that almost always gives me buyers remorse when buying a new car. I dread the day when I have to reprogram one of these things to my garage door motor. And don’t even think about going to the owner’s manual. You’d have better luck trying to assemble IKEA furniture without instructions.
Step 1. Put the key in. Step 2. Get on a ladder and press a button you can’t find. Step 3. Press the button but only for this many seconds and then it should blink like this (which it NEVER does). Step 4. If it doesn’t blink (see they know it doesn’t work or there wouldn’t be a step 4), go to step 5. Step 5. Press this button twice, then hold that button, then stick your head out the window and scream. You think I’m joking. But it’s pretty much verbatim from my owner’s manual.
Seriously though, it’s really a terribly uneasy process for me to program these things. Once, and only once, I had it go smoothly. Most of the time, it’s a challenge. I result to reading and rereading the owner’s manual. I go to YouTube because I’m apparently an idiot and I can’t figure out basic(ish) English in the manual. I’m hoping there’s a Dummy’s Guide to Programming your Ford remote. To no avail, nothing. I scour the manual a few more times. Eventually, I come across the fine print website saying you can go here and do this to figure it out. I read, reread, read again, Google, translate the Chinese writing to see if it holds any secrets. Then eventually, I figure out the sequence because of an obscure sentence on the manufacturer’s website that has it worded a little differently and get the remote programmed. The next time I have to do it, the steps will be entirely different because, you guessed it, it’s different for every Ford vehicle even though it’s all the same system. Please, shoot me now.
Now that I’ve sufficiently amused you with my disparity of a very first-world problem, let me hit you with some truth. How often do you live your Christian walk the same way? How often do you walk day by day doing the same things, or trying different things, without consulting the manual? How often do you go to the maker directly to figure out the solution? Yeah, there’s some analogies here I’d like to unpack.
Programming the opener is life. You have to live it. It’s what you were given. You could choose not to use that built-in feature, but you’d have to have something separate taking up space. It might fall off when you pull the visor down to block the bright light and cause an accident when you try to pick it up. But, programming that thing is the analogy of life. The owner’s manual is the Bible. The Bible is the living Word of God. You can read it and read it and read it and still sometimes not understand it. And the manufacturer’s website is the Holy Spirit. That’s you turning to the Maker to get help directly from the source. Oh, and YouTube, we’ll call that the local church.
How often do you go through life not opening your Bible? How often do you open your Bible but get frustrated because you can’t understand what it’s telling you? Do you go to church to help you? Sometimes church isn’t the answer. Sometimes you must go to God Himself and turn to the Holy Spirit for guidance.
You’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t figure it out. You’re going to be stuck in that garage trying to get it done and get frustrated, beat your head against the seatback, and get annoyed that you keep getting the same failing results. No matter where you are at in your journey, I believe you can learn something from this silly story about programming a remote. I have had lots of Ford vehicles. But I always have problems when I try to program them on my own. It’s the same thing for my life. I always have problems when I try to face my challenges and struggles on my own. Even if I have faced them before, I always need to go back to the Manual and the Maker to get through them.
It's All About Perspective 