Restoring Our Connections

Three times can't be a coincidence, can it?  Three times in the past month, we've had - and fixed - electrical connection issues.

First, it was a frigid house alerting us to the fact that our timed thermostat had been unknowingly jostled, such that it wasn't connected to the wires that lead to our gas furnace.  So you could time it all you wanted, but without being connected, it had no way of telling the gas furnace to fire up. 

Second, our hallway and bathroom lights started intermittently shutting down for no reason.  An electrician couldn't figure out why it was doing that, but he figured out where it was happening and bypassed the problem area, hooking the wires into another, live source of juice.

Third, Amy's birthday present for Aaron - a roaring dinosaur transformer contraption - wasn't able to turn on, despite the fact that we tried three different sets of batteries and read the user manual from front to back.  Her enterprising brother deciding to disassemble the whole console, and when he did, he saw a wire that had come loose; once he connected it back in, the whole thing worked.

Even in 2013, electricity still requires an unbroken connection.  No matter how intricate our home heating system, lighting, or toys are, one little break in the action and the juice stops.  Let me rephrase this so that you can grasp the incongruity: for all of the complexity involved in heating a home, lighting a hallway, and making a dinosaur transformer roar, it can all be felled if two little wire tips cease to touch. 

Is there a lesson here for the church?  Are we susceptible to building all sorts of complicated structures for feeding the congregation and reaching out to the world, and we are powered off because a few seemingly insignificant connections have become loose?  My threefold experience with how electricity works - and doesn't work - will be a reminder to me to mind all my connections.