I accidentally severed my connection to the outside world last week. Behind the phone jack switchplate was a mess of wires and connectors. Generally speaking, electrical connections and phone connections are not that complicated as long as you can figure out where the right wires need to go. So I reasoned that if I could untangle the mess of wires and figure out what needed to be reconnected, I could fix it myself. I had a new phone jack and the wires are all color coded so just hooking up to a new jack shouldn't be too difficult.
Except that the "old" connection was actually two connections. One worked, one didn't. The one that didn't work used the blue wires, the one that did work used the orange wires, and the green wires didn't appear to be used at all. The blue wires were hooked into the red and green wires on the non-working phone jack while the black and yellow wires had nothing hooked into them. The orange wires were hooked into the red and green wires on the working phone jack and again, nothing to the black and yellow wires. Confused yet? It was a mess.
So I spent some time over the weekend stripping wires and connecting them in different configurations hoping something would work. I tried wiring it the same as the old working phone jack. I tried wiring it the same as the old non-working phone jack. Neither of which worked. So I took some time off.
After my brain had rolled it around for a couple of days, I had some different ideas of what to try and tackled it again last night. I started in on my fruitless quest and was working away when my eyes fell on the instruction sheet. Huh. Guess what? The blue wires go to the green. The blue striped wires go to the red. The orange wires go to the yellow. And the orange striped wires go to the black.
I am not a complete idiot. I had looked at the instructions previously but I was so caught up in trying to replicate the "old" way of wiring that I had ignored the instructions with the new jack. And the instructions meant more to me after I had been working with the wires and jack for a while.
Amazingly enough, once I connected the wires as instructed, the phone connection started functioning and I was able to get all the wires back in the wall and the switchplate mounted in a short amount of time.
Lessons? Yes.
Do I ever do things "the old way" without looking for a better way to do it?
Do I ever forget to check the "instructions" of scriptures and prophets? Do they sometimes mean more to me after trying to do it on my own for a while?
Do things work out when I follow God's plan?
