Grill Hack Plus Powerful Testimony

I have been a very, very bad boy.

I got myself a stainless portable grill from Pit Boss. Very nice grill. It will make a credible rib eye, IF you let the fat burn off the heat deflectors and add additional heat to the meat. Otherwise, it’s not quite optimal. You have to play around a little to make it do an acceptable job using the racks, and it’s definitely too weak to heat a cast iron griddle for steaks. The propane flames are not very high when you use the grill as adjusted by the factory.

I got myself a Loco-brand high-pressure regulator to increase the flow, but when I tried to use it, the burners wouldn’t accept the additional gas. The flames blew out. I figured it was time to take the regulator back to Lowe’s.

Today I Googled, and I learned something great: gas grills have carburetors.

A carburetor mixes air and fuel in the right proportions. You can’t just pump propane through a burner and hope for good results. You have to have the carburetor (“air shutter”) adjusted correctly.

Guess what I did?

An air shutter is just a metal sleeve that’s open on one side. Air flows through the open space. You rotate the sleeve to get the right size space. Sometimes grills need adjusting, and you’re supposed to adjust the air shutter to fix them. You’re supposed to do this while the grill is on low heat.

Right. Low.

Again, guess what I did?

I got me a Philips screwdriver, LIBERATED the air shutter on my right burner, turned on the gas, and adjusted it until the burner would support a really decent flame. When I saw that this worked, I did the other side.

Will my grill still work on low heat? Who cares? Why would you want a grill to work on low heat? What possible benefit is there in that? Are you planning to heat baby food on the grill? Grills are for charring meat and other food, period. If you’re cooking things on moderate heat in a grill, you made a mistake. What you really wanted was a toaster oven.

This is exciting. I may be able to produce correctly cooked steaks on the grill now, both with the rack and with the griddle.

I hate the way hippies and lawyers ruin grilling. I know they’re behind the pathetic limitations on gas grills. They’re behind everything that ruins fun.

A grill that doesn’t heat up enough is like a Mustang with a 4-cylinder engine. What is the purpose? There is none.

I was going to try to have something other than steak for dinner tonight, but you can probably guess what I’m going to do. I’m off to the store shortly.

I’m not one of those people who think all meat has to have a black, crunchy layer of carbon on it, but grey steaks or brown steaks with a few wimpy black grill marks are just wrong. Burgers should also have some charring.

I admit, I like fried burgers from Wendy’s and Five Guys, even though they’re not really cooked correctly. Somehow, these chains make grey, well-done burgers work. But a good grilled burger with some charring is a whole lot better.

I am really pinning the Smug-O-Meter today.

Will the excess heat destroy the grill? I don’t care. The experiment is too important to drop for the sake of a grill. This is for science, people.

In other news, I have a testimony. My friend Travis got released from probation, unexpectedly. I have his permission to tell about it.

I can never remember whether I’ve revealed his name here before. Often, I use fake names for people, and I can’t keep track. Anyway, he is house-sitting in my dad’s old house while I sell it.

A few years back, he did something that wasn’t very clever. He tried to move a car across town with an expired tag. These days, cops have scanning machines that look at license plates, and when a scanner sees a bad tag, it lets the cops know. Travis got pulled over, and because he had some license issues already, he panicked. He took off. That’s a felony. The cop claimed he tried to hit him, which is a great way to pump up the charges. That’s also a felony.

Travis got five years of probation, and it has been very hard. He can’t travel without permission. He had to do miserable manual labor at a park. He had to meet with his P.O. over and over. His P.O. and the other people with oversight kept screwing up and causing problems for him. For example, the people at the park failed to record a bunch of his hours.

His P.O. violated his probation because he failed to meet with him. Travis had gone to his office and called him many times, but the P.O. wasn’t there when he was supposed to be, and he didn’t return calls. Travis had to go to a hearing today. The big danger was that they would revoke his probation, give him a felony conviction, and put him away.

Of course, I have been advising him all along. I don’t give him legal advice, per se, but I tell him obvious things. Never complain. Never look angry. Always sound grateful. Be polite. When you have to go to court or to see your P.O., be on time. Keep records of everything. Take responsibility for what you did. Do everything they tell you to do. I also gave him all sorts of spiritual advice.

We have been praying about his hearing. Today he called me while I was planting dwarf podocarpus shrubs, and he gave me the amazing news. The judge terminated his probation instead of revoking it. He is done. No conviction. No more meetings. No more working at the park.

He said he was nervous because the judge was crabby. She had been laying the smackdown on people before his turn came. When he was called, he had all his papers. He was polite. He didn’t interrupt. She told him his probation was terminated as of today.

Sounds good, right? It gets much better.

His dad has MS. He is in a bad nursing home. He has been steeped in bitterness, pride, and anger for years. When his son got a scholarship to the University of Miami, he did virtually nothing to help. Sometimes he told Travis he wanted him out of his life.

We have been praying for his dad ever since I can remember. Travis was afraid he would die before he turned back to Jesus. This week, his dad was hospitalized for an infection caused by a catheter, and he was intubated. It looked bad.

I asked God about it, and he seemed to say Travis’s dad would repent.

We prayed and spoke blessings and curses, and yesterday, unexpectedly, Travis’s dad repented and gave his life back to Jesus. Now they pray together. You can’t imagine Travis’s relief, but I can. My dad finally gave in this year at the age of 87, a few weeks before he died.

Pretty good week, wouldn’t you agree?

As Travis said on the phone today, this stuff really works.

I’m amazed that God has been able to make good use of me. I think of myself as a selfish and solitary person with few human interactions, but somehow I have found myself at the center of a small group of people who listen to me, and when I tell them about the things God has used to change my life, he changes theirs, too. God used me to help Travis, and he used Travis to reach his dad. Travis has a lot of friends he’s influencing, too.

The Bible says people will know God’s children by their fruit, and people misinterpret this and say it means their works or their personalities. In reality, it refers to other human beings they reach. Jesus said he was the true vine, and we were the branches. He said any branch that didn’t bear fruit would be cut off and burned. What is the purpose of a branch? To bear fruit. What is fruit? It’s a means of reproduction. God uses us to reproduce his nature in human beings.

This is a good day.

I’m off to Winn-Dixie. Hope they have some nice cheap rib eyes.