Never Have a Power Outage

When I arrived home Sunday after worship I said to Becky, “The sky in the west is really dark. It looks like a storm is coming.” I’m not a weatherman or a prophet, but I do have a firm grasp of the obvious. By the time I had changed clothes and we sat down for lunch, the wind was blowing our furniture on our deck around and it was as dark as night. We went to the basement to watch television to see what they were saying. We were under a “severe storm warning”, but not tornadoes. For the next half hour to forty-five minutes the wind blew hard and the rain poured sideways. Then the sky cleared, the sun shone brightly returning the outside to its sauna-like status.

At the time we had no idea that only a few miles north, things had been much worse. Running east from West Chicago and moving through Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Lombard, Villa Park and into Elmhurst, the winds had been stronger and had done much more damage. Trees were toppled, limbs fell and power lines were broken, looking as if someone had dropped a huge bowl of black spaghetti into the street and people’s yards. Many were without power for two days or more.

With temperatures flirting with 100 degrees and high humidity, it didn’t take long for homes to become horribly uncomfortable. Air conditioners, refrigerators, freezers, computers, televisions, and phone chargers were all out of commission. For many, 48 hours without those modern conveniences became nearly unbearable.

As I listened to the complaints and the difficulties as placed on Facebook, (you can’t let a lack of electricity keep you from posting your status on Facebook!), I began to think about what it means to live in a global society. National economies are more interconnected. People are doing business all over the world. Every college recommends to their students that they spend at least one semester studying abroad because we are living in an ever shrinking world, and it will be important to know how to adapt to other cultures.

People around the world live every day in conditions we experienced for only a couple of days. People in Haiti deal with heat and humidity year around and many still live in tent cities and in temporary housing because of the devastating earthquake of 2010. They don’t have electricity, cell phones, computers and some struggle for food. Many people in third world countries have a hard time finding drinking water that isn’t polluted. There are places where women carry laundry down to the river to wash it by hand and then carry it home to dry.

We are a bit spoiled in America. We have a hard time living without all of the conveniences that we take for granted. Our culture is built on having power and when we don’t it is disruptive.

It may be good to lose power once in a while, so that we can recall how grateful we are when we have it!

There is something ironic about how disruptive power outages can be. The power of God is available to us 24/7/365 and can never be disrupted. The Holy Spirit is constantly available and will never fail us. The only thing that prevents us from using the power of Holy Spirit is our failure to tap into the Holy Spirit’s availability.

Let the power flow!

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