The power went out at the church this morning in the middle of our Breakfast Club Bible study. It was about 9:00.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
By 10:00 everyone had left and I had the chance to investigate. It wasn’t a single breaker or fuse – the whole church had gone primitive.<\/p>\n\n\n
It was a perfect summer morning – blue skies, no storms.<\/p>\n\n\n
No branches had fallen on any wires.<\/p>\n\n\n
No transformer had exploded.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Since the day was bright and I couldn’t just look down the street for darkened windows to judge if neighbors were also without power, I decided the only way to know if the problem was limited to the church would be to knock at a house close to the church.<\/p>\n\n\n
As an introvert, it’s not really like me to go knocking on strangers’ doors, but the power outage gave me a good excuse to meet a neighbor and, honestly, I thought God might be disappointed if I passed.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
After all, how can we love our neighbors if we’ve never even met?<\/p>\n\n\n
So I strode up to the door of the house just on the far edge of our gravel parking lot and knocked as confidently as I could manage. Out came a genial young man named Jacob who works third shift at Toyota and loves to fish.<\/p>\n\n\n
We must have chatted on his porch for 20 minutes or more. Jacob turned out to be a super pleasant guy. At one point he asked if I was the one who “owned” the church and that made me chuckle.<\/p>\n\n\n
Anyway, he confirmed that the power was just fine at his house. I returned to the church, happy that I had not shrunk from the opportunity to meet a neighbor.<\/p>\n\n\n
When I walked through the door and stepped inside the building, the power came back on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The power went out at the church this morning in the middle of our Breakfast Club Bible study. It was about 9:00.\u00a0 By 10:00 everyone had left and I had the chance to investigate. It wasn’t a single breaker or fuse – the whole church had gone primitive. It was a perfect summer morning – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9417,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416\/revisions\/9417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}