After a discouraging day yesterday trying to rod out a basement drain pipe, my brother-in-law Bervin and nephew Karl returned early this morning with a bigger, better cable machine, determined to solve the problem. They’d figured out that the pipe, on its way from our shower to the street sewer, had become blocked with hair-like roots surrounded by globs of dirt.

Apparently a tiny root needs only a sliver between two sections of clay pipe to work its way in. As it grows, it produces a network of new roots, and the steady water supply of a shower-fed pipe facilitates hearty growth.

Little by little dirt follows roots into the pipe, and voila, a colossal clog. The guys pulled out a bucket-full of root-parts along with a generous supply of rich black soil, and it wasn’t long before the basement smelled like a newly rototilled garden.

As Bervin forced the twisting cable further and further down the pipe, there was no end to the root-dirt combo they found. It seemed to be literally filling the pipe, some roots the thickness of a finger. How any shower water could have drained in recent weeks was beyond our understanding.

About 3 hours later and 60 feet of cable down the pipe, our diligent workers reached an impasse beyond which the spinning line absolutely refused to go. By their calculations, it had passed under our entire basement floor, through the front yard, and out to the road in front of our house. Still the whoosh of free-flowing water we’d all longed to hear, hadn’t happened.

Eventually everybody runs into projects like this one, a set of rigid circumstances that refuses to bend to our will. It’s exasperating and even angering, but neither of those emotions help solve the problem.

Sometimes we encounter people-projects just as exasperating and angering, and our frustration leads us to apply the same force to change a person as we applied to the basement pipe, with the hope that we can make someone bend to our will. We might use our most creative ingenuity in an effort to force them to change, but much like our basement dilemma, for various reasons it doesn’t work.

After years of trying and lots of failing on my part, I’ve finally learned there’s only one way to change another person, and that’s to step back and let God do it. His power to convict, correct, and create something new within a human being is in a category all its own, just like a professional plumber’s high-powered equipment is superior to anything we’ve been able to use in our pipe.

God’s Spirit can cause change to flow into someone’s life like we never could, and I’m hoping a well-equipped plumber will be able to get water flowing through my shower drain again.

(Fingers crossed.)

Jesus cried out, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ ” (John 7:38)