“And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:19 (NIV)
Last week we had a very interesting thing happen to our family. Bill and I were relaxing together watching TV and my text alert went off. Not unusual but when I went to check it, it was the power company… telling me that “our power outage had been reported, they had a crew assigned but no restoration estimate available yet.”
Like I said, Bill and I were sitting there watching TV as the phone is telling me we have no power, but the crew is assigned and addressing the issue. Fast forward approximately 1 ½ hours later – all homework completed, showers taken and everyone is settling in getting ready for bed. All of a sudden, no power.
This time I called the power company and the automated message told me that power was estimated to be restored by 11 PM the following day. More than 24 hours without power. We now have a reptile living in our home who needs heat lamps. Gone are the days of pretending we’re pioneers. With our little one asking the innocent question, “Does this mean Jewel is going to die?” we spent the next 45 minutes starting the generator and showing our son Jewel’s heat source burning brightly before going to sleep.
We woke up the next morning to the wonderful surprise that our power was back, fully functioning. Knowing I needed to put some gas in the car before taking our youngest to school, we went to a different gas station than usual. There were only two people pumping gas – us and a man filling up gas cans, a sure sign that he also has a generator.
I proceeded to ask him, “Did you lose power too?”
“Yup,” was his reply.
“I’m so sorry – where do you live?”
In our conversation I discovered that he lived not too far from us and that his estimated restoration time was also 11 PM this evening.
After dropping off our son, I went home and put in a full day’s work and early afternoon received another text alert, from the power company: “Your power has now been restored.”
That whole experience baffled me. We live in the country and lose our power a lot. Especially when the wind blows and it was blowing hard that particular day. However, never in the 17+ years I’ve lived with my husband have we EVER had the power company alert us that we have no power (when in fact we still do) hours before we actually lose it. Then, to have it be restored during the night but the power company doesn’t tell me again until hours later.
Come back next time and I will tell you how God used this very interesting event to speak to more for me than just electricity.
© Cheri Swalwell 2017