When the House Goes Dark

 

 

“Good news,” my wife told me over the phone.  “Our power is back on.”

It was good news.  We had had a bit of snow followed by a lot of freezing rain and the end result was down power lines and lots of trees pulled down.  Our power had gone off at 5 that morning and it apparently had blinked back to life sometime in the late afternoon.

Part of the problem with living in a rural area is that when you lose power, not only do you lose the ability to cook and run your heat, but your well pump doesn’t work either.  Suddenly, flushing the toilet and taking showers jumps to the top of activities you want to do – only you can’t.

I came home to find electric lights burning brightly.  When I turned a faucet on a little later, water flowed out in an unbroken stream for me to wash my hands and continued until I turned it back off.

Oh, bliss...

All was well until about 8:30 that evening.

Our family was sitting together, and I was reading a short devotional when, all of a sudden, the power blinked, came back on, blinked again, and then with the finality of a judge’s gavel, shut off completely, leaving us in the dark.

“OH NO!!”  Our youngest, Elise said.  “Turn on the lights!”

“We can’t,” Elaine said.  “There must be power lines down between here and the power station.”

I went to grab a flashlight.  When I returned, my oldest son said, “You know what’s nice Dad?”

“What’s that, Vincent?”  I couldn’t see any silver lining at the moment – mostly because I was having a hard time seeing.

“There’s power in the blood!”  He said.  The Dad jokes start young these days.

It was awfully dark that night.  There were no night lights and no forty minute showers.  Just blankets and bed and boredom.

(Interestingly, we were still able to power on all of the old-fashioned books in the house...)

The power stayed off until the following afternoon.  It was a blessing that it came on when it did – I knew several families in the area who didn’t get power back for nearly a week after the ice storm.

“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”  (I Thessalonians 5:18)

I’m not sure what to be thankful for in a situation where you lose power for roughly 36 hours.  The fact that it came back on for a four hour stretch in the middle?  The fact that we didn’t lose it for longer?

What I know for certain is that I value things more after I lose them.  So much of life centers around things that we take for granted.  These are things like health and functioning vehicles and even electricity.  When those things go away, even for a short period of time, suddenly the difficulty level of getting through our days ramps up considerably.

I would love to learn to be thankful for things that I have, long before the house goes dark.