The Right Power Source

As seen in the Village Voice and the HEARTbeat 

“The Right Power Source”

            I’ve never been one to trust electricity.  “Just respect and it will respect you,” my father used to tell me.  It’s almost like he treated electricity as if it was alive and had its own personality.  Maybe he was correct!  I’ve never found something that wasn’t alive that could bite as hard as electricity.

            Electricians are phenomenal people.  I believe they can look at a house and see it as if it were a spider web of circuits that coexist beside each other, yet all connecting to a central point, the breaker box.  And of course there isn’t just one type of circuit, there are the normal circuits for the wall outlets and lights and another for the appliances such as the stove and air conditioning and heating systems: the 110 and the 220-volt circuits.  Plug the wrong appliance into the wrong circuit and the results are not good.

            In my last deployment to Iraq, we setup shop in what would be our brigade tactical operation center, or the TOC as it was called.  We carefully unpacked all the computers, the screens, the printers; everything we would need to run operations.  The younger soldiers, those who had no trouble lifting our “battle printer” made a huge tactical error.  We had carried this huge printer from training site to battle site for over eight years.  It was heavy, but nothing could outperform it.  It, like the back of a class-A motorhome, had stickers denoting the many places and units it had performed under.  But its life span soon came to an end.

            As the soldiers were setting it up, one plugged it into the wall socket.  This was the issue: the normal circuit in that area of the world is 220 volts, not the 110 we are familiar with and the one the printer needed.  The printer began to “boot up,” but a few minutes later smoke began to pour out of the vents.  A couple of soldiers grabbed the table it was on and quickly carried out the side door.  After it cooled, we opened it up for examination.  We found it had literally melted down because it could not handle the wrong power source.  It could no longer perform the tasks it was assigned to do.

            Are you able to perform the tasks you are assigned to do – by God?  We are tasked to go into all the world, tell them about the saving grace and love of Jesus Christ, and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  But on whose power circuit are you depending.  The world is not the correct power source for this effort.  Relying on it, we run out of energy when we hit resistance.  We can even experience a “melt down” and not be able to execute our tasks at all!

            The Holy Spirit who indwells in each of God’s children give us power, direction, and the right words to say at just the right time.  He is the right power source.  Not only is He a source to depend on for spreading the Good News, He is also the right power source for day-to-day living.

            Don’t have the right power source.  You can “turn on” the correct power by getting on your knees and plugging into God’s power grid!