When you're completely powerless...

I got up bright and early this morning, because I had lots of work to do on the computer. I have a couple of powerpoint presentations to prepare for speaking at a church service on Sunday morning and, with hospital visits in the afternoon and evening, and other ministry work to catch up on in the mornings, I'm beginning to be aware that time is getting short if I've to complete the slides before the weekend.

When I switched on my laptop, I got a surprise to see a message telling me the battery was low; I thought I was running on electricity. You can imagine my dismay when I looked down and realised that my power adaptor wasn't working any more and that I would be computerless in only half an hour. I would need to make a trip to Glasgow to get a new power lead. So I switched on my Mum's computer and went on the internet to find the phone number of the computer store. Just as I was writing it down, the computer screen went blank and suddenly the whole house was plunged into darkness. It was a power cut, and that not only meant no computer and no internet, but also no heating, no lights and no telephone. Looking out the window into the early morning gloom, I realised that the gale force winds (around 160 kph) had probably felled a tree and damaged a power line.
The tall trees in the lane behind our house were swaying and groaning precariously: rather scary when you considered that our house and the greenhouse would be right in its path if one of them were to topple over. Some smaller, thinner trees were blowing almost horizontal, and I was amazed that they weren't simply uprooted and blown away. It shows that even the weakest tree can withstand the storm if its root system is strong and deeply anchored.

The electricity still hadn't come back on by the time we left for the hospital, and all my calls from a cellphone to the computer store were met with an answering machine. Whether the store was really closed or whether their phones were down like ours, I'm not sure, but I couldn't have got to Glasgow anyway, as the electricity failure meant that many trains were cancelled. As we drove to the hospital, we counted almost twenty fallen trees - all along the road at Callendar Park Road and then again in front of Dollar Park. In fact, we had to take a detour in Falkirk because one road was closed due to a huge fallen tree lying right across it. I noticed that the fallen trees were either huge ones with old roots that had gone rotten, or they were new plantings where the roots had not been anchored deep enough. No wonder the Bible tells us that we need to let Christ dwell in our hearts through faith, so that we can be deeply rooted and anchored in God's love. If our faith is superficial or our love has grown "old," we may not have the resilience needed to weather life's storms.

Dad was doing well again today, beginning to eat just a little more, and pleased to report that he didn't have any pain today. His nurse told us that his protein level is slowly improving and he's now at the top of the waiting list for a bed in the rehabilitation ward.

When we got back home this afternoon, we discovered that we finally had electricity again. However, I'm still without a computer to prepare my messages for Sunday, and will need to catch a train into Glasgow tomorrow. Fortunately, the wind seems to have subsided again and so there shouldn't be any more power or public transport disruptions.