We depend on electricity.  It warms our food, cools our homes, and brings light into the darkness.  It can be used to start a car, or even restart a heart.  I use a form of electricity every day, even when I am “roughing it” I still have a cell phone, a camera, or a GPS.  Electricity is nearly as much a part of my life as breathing.  If I consider that even the clothes I wear likely required electricity to make, it is difficult to escape its influence, and its importance.

In some ways, you could say that my dependence on electricity is greater than my dependence on God.  In fact, my bible now requires electricity to read, since I use an app on my phone instead of a paper version.  I suspect that you are not much different than I am in that regard.  For many people, including me, we are more likely to use a light switch during the day than we are to read the bible.   Even our modern worship services depend on electricity for amplification and presentation.

In Haiti electricity is available, but it is difficult to predict.  Some homes do not have it, but others do.  The compound that we are staying in has electricity provided to it from several sources.  For most of the day electricity comes from a nearby cement plant that provides it to the orphanage in exchange for access to water from a spring.  For some reason this electricity is not available all day, and there will be times when the staff at Tytoo will need to turn on a large industrial generator to take over.  Once power is restored, the generator is turned back off.

It is easy to live life without even acknowledging our daily electrical use, but the ability to ignore our use of electricity goes away as soon as the power goes out.  When the power goes out in a dark place, we stumble around searching desperately for a source of light.  Candles are lit, flashlights pulled from drawers and then replaced in disgust as we realize the batteries are dead.  We open the blinds or use our phones to find our way.  We are restless because so much of what we do in a normal day involves electricity.

Haiti can be a dark place, and sometimes the electricity goes out.

Last week the power went out during our Haitian worship service.  The sound system turned off and the electronic keyboards crashed.  I suspect that in many North American churches this would be cause to cancel services for the rest of the day, and I acknowledge that the way we do things is greatly enhanced by electricity.  I can imagine the confusion in my own church as emergency lights would snap on to light the windowless sanctuary.

In Haiti, the dwelling place of uncertainty, 40 Haitian voices continued in praise.  Each word just as strong as the ones before it.  It startled me to hear so many people unaffected by an unexpected loss of electricity, and it made me wonder if sometimes we depend too much on outside power to make our North American church services seem impressive.  I will say that 40 raw and untrained Haitian voices would easily rival a 300 person North American church service in volume.

I hope to learn to depend less on outside power to make an impact through my life.  Not by senselessly throwing away tools that are valuable, but by developing other internal tools that can not be taken away.

Those living in the dark have seen a great light, they bring it with them, and it lives inside of their hearts.