The Ripple Effect

My mother had sent me to the little corner grocery for something, I don’t remember exactly, except I was to also get ice cream for a rare treat to have the next night after supper to celebrate my younger sister’s birthday. I clearly remember stepping in the front door of the store and the lights began to flash off and on several times. Being November in Upstate New York the sun had already set and with a final thump, I stood in total darkness. The grocer and his wife excitedly spoke to one another across the room, with concern and a sense of panic. Then with another thump the lights came back on. I made my purchase and went home to find my parents deeply distressed. The radio and television stations had all gone off the air, nothing but a hissing sound and snow on the screen. The fear of nuclear warfare loomed in the minds of folks as a frightful possibility, and the fear was that this had become a reality. It was the hours before we knew for sure this was not the case and a week before we knew what had really happened. An electrical relay had tripped at the Sir Adam Beck Power Station on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The stage had been set when the new rely had been inadvertently set too low a few days before; it tripped under load at 5:16 p.m. on November 9, 1965. It was this incident that inspired the 1968 film, “Where Were You When The Lights Went Out?” By 5:27 p.m. New York City had plunged completely into darkness. An estimated 80,000 people were trapped in the subways and countless stuck in elevators. Traffic lights went blank and streets became motionless. 250 flights into JFK airport were diverted. Thousands of square miles of the Northeast Power Grid were void of electricity putting over 25 million people in the dark. Fortunately, many small communities, like where I lived, on rivers throughout the failed grid, with hydro-electric dams, were spared the total darkness as the local generators removed themselves from the grid and supplied power, hence our lights came back on, yet we were in communication darkness. This all happened because of one safety relay being set too low tripping prematurely, overloading other safety relays causing them to trip, and so on all the way through the grid – the “Ripple Effect.”


Romans 14:7] “For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So weather we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” John Donne is famous for his book, “No Man Is An Island”. We affect one another as we interact in daily life; no one lives in isolation; no one lives truly alone. We all cause a rippling effect of our own each day with most every move we make. We would all be amazed if we knew how far out into the world the ripples of our actions of life reached. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a ripple effect like the one caused by the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. The ripples of His blood, shed for the forgiveness of our sins, sent waves into the past as well as the future. His life and sacrifice has touched each one of us in a personal and eternal way. We are who we are because of who He was and is. COVID-19 is having a tremendous rippling effect on our world. Our government officials have come just short of declaring Marshal Law, and the assembling of people has become a temporary impossibility without being unlawful (www.floresvilletx.gov). A decision was made not to have worship assembly this Sunday in compliance with local emergency rules and regulations. Hence I’ve been accused of caving into the government and “forsaking the Lord”. Read: Romans 13 and Hebrews 10:25. For the safety of all concerned, we will comply, and NO we don’t expect to make this a habit! Pray for God’s mercy on us all