Job 16:14
He bursts upon me, Breach after breach,
Rushes at me, Like a warrior.
If he were my sinuses, then this would represent the last week of my life. I spent large portions of my young life with a runny nose, and after a surgery, I seem to have filled that slot with a cough from postnasal drip. The worst part this go around is the lack of sleep. I have learned to not cough too hard as the strain on the stomach muscles is worse the harder I cough. Sleep would be really nice though.
‘Bursts’ was also ‘breaks’, ‘cracks’, and simply ‘breaches’. ‘Breach after breach’ was also ‘again and again’ and ‘wound upon wound’. I like ‘wound upon wound’, but it seemed too narrow.
‘Rushes’ was also ‘runs’; ‘at’ was also ‘upon’ and ‘through’; and ‘warrior’ was also ‘giant’ and ‘champion’.
For work, my team has been trying to carry out a test of a design that the design team wanted nothing to do with. Our design is based on a very complicated analyses called Computation Fluid Dynamics or CFD for short. Basically, you are trying to simulate the movement of individual particles within a system. Our system was one tank with about 7,000 gallons of water. The generic run took a whole day and covered only five and a half minutes of water flow. Modeling the tank and all the variables involved took quite a bit of effort, but we finally achieved a design that met the goal of moving 4,000 gallons with minimal temperature change over 282 seconds.
The ultimate problem was that the end client has been burned by someone else’s previous mistake and wanted a physical test to verify the design as they simply did not want to believe the computer run itself. I understood their position, but it seems that someone on their team was not technical enough to understand the difference between the results from a ‘perfect’ computer simulation and an ‘imperfect’ test configuration. We are hoping their engineers can use the results to prove the case, but when you want one half degree change or less in a system where the best measurement is plus or minus two degrees, you start out failing.
Such is our life when we expect God to make it all better anyway. Recently, I have been reminded again that sleeping with your phone charging inches from your head creates electronic fields that mess with your brain. When you use your phone as an alarm clock, it’s hard to put it in another room like you should. I am going to try to do so tonight and use my regular alarm clock, but I must admit, relying on a clock again instead of my phone feels wrong. We had a friend who lost their brother early because his job on the submarine was to stick his head in the reactor just to make sure. Everyone knew it was doing damage, but someone had to do it. God did not work a miracle to make it all go away. When we continue to do wrong, God will continue to present us with the consequences.
Written 7/16/25, Posted 9/2/25, Job 387