Our Problems are Ultimately for Our Good

I was looking over my journal of divine acts which I experienced when I came across this entry, which I decided to share:

Friday, February 4, 2022. “Don’t ever doubt or pout when things just don’t work out. Smile, for you’re part of God’s inside clan, and this is part of His divine plan. Doesn’t that thought make you feel grand?”

I wrote this verse after a very trying week of mine. Let me tell you the story:

At the workshop I administrate, we got the job of printing, stuffing, and mailing 2,300 flyers for a local business. We started printing the document as soon as we received it, for I knew the printing would be the slowest part of our system. On Friday, January 29th, we got a start on the project and ran the printer as much as possible. That evening I went back to the workshop to keep running the printer and check the toner levels, and that is when the blue toner got all.

Oh, I never thought of making sure we have plenty of toner. I went home and ordered toners online that night yet.

Now, regarding toner options, there was an aftermarket toner for $150, which has the chance of not working as well. Then there was OEM (name brand) toner for $320, which should work very well. As I looked across the options, I found some aftermarket toner that was 100% guaranteed, and supposedly went through the same vigorous test that the OEM toner went through, for $146.

I took the chance and bought the aftermarket toner with 2-day shipping. It arrived Tuesday morning, and we put the blue toner in the printer and were soon back in business. But, after 60 pages the flyer started looking horrible. I thought maybe some nozzles needed cleaning, and I went through the printer settings to find the cleaning option. All the time, my mind was thinking, “It is probably the cheap toner.”

We had Workshop newsletters to print, so I tried to print those, and they printed quite well. But when we returned to the flyers again, we had the same problem. Now the flyers printed from a different tray, in which letter-size paper came out sideways. I thought maybe if we used the other tray and got the paper coming out the long way like the newsletter did that printed well, we might be okay. But when we tried that, the paper would jam every time. Not being able to come up with a solution by the time the boys went home, I went home as well.

I ordered OEM toner with two-day shipping, and later that evening I went back to the workshop to scratch my head about it some more. I discovered it was jamming every time because I had the paper turned the wrong way in the tray. When I turned it the right way, it printed like all good printers do when things are correct. The print quality was much better as well. Although there were a few spots, we decided it was good enough and got back into printing as much as possible.

On Wednesday, I received a request to do still another printing project. After talking it over with the board, we concluded we did not want to turn down work, so we decided to work Thursdays, which is typically my day off, so we could get a bunch of work knocked out and not have to turn down the third printing job.

So we got together Thursday and got a lot of work done—till we ran out of blue toner around 1:00 in the afternoon.

I could have screamed. I was sure we only got a fraction out of that toner compared to what it was supposed to yield. (I found out later I was figuring incorrectly, and it did yield close to what it was rated for.)

Well, I was glad I had toner ordered that was supposed to be in on Friday. To think I would not have ordered it if we had not run into print quality problems and blamed it on the cheap toner.

Friday morning, when I tried to print the return address on the envelopes, they jammed every time. And this time, I made sure they were not jamming for the reason the flyers had.

So we drove to my place to print envelopes on my personal printer and pick up the toner when it arrived. We had not been there long until UPS dropped off a package. It happened to be very icy that morning, and the delivery driver wondered if he could drop off a package for the farm in the lane so he did not have to drive in there. We said that would be fine, which made his day. So while the printer was printing envelopes, we walked the other package into the farm.

(Notice the timing, how the UPS arrived soon after we did, and we made his day by accepting the parcel that belonged in the lane. And notice that we would not have been there if the envelopes had not been jamming on the workshop’s printer.)

We put the OEM toners in the printer to continue the job, but we soon saw that the quality issue remained. The problem was not the toner, after all. But if I had not gotten the cheap toners the first time, we would not have blamed the quality issues on the toner. Thus, I would not have ordered the second toner until we ran out, which would have delayed the printing further.

“Thank you, Father, for being willing to endure my frustration while you tweaked things to hold out for the best. May I never doubt your all-wise control of events.”

Click below to read more entries from this journal of divine acts.