Turn On the Light

I spoke to the employees of Flint Energies early this morning. Flint Energies is a rural electric cooperative that provides electricity to over 67,000 customers in central Georgia. For the past 20 years or so I have been one of their customers. In other words, they get money from me every single month.

I would estimate that I have paid them somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 during those 20 years. And it has been worth every dime.

There have been a few times I have been without electricity but they are very few. They have professional crews who work to keep our power going and work all hours of the night when there are outages. Their delivery system is incredible.

It’s easy for us to take for granted the service they provide.

I was reminded of that this morning when a member of this organization handed me an article about a lady from South Florida who has been without power since the hurricane.

That is Hurricane Andrew by the way. Hurricane Andrew happened on August 24, 1992.

This lady had no heat and no air conditioning and has not had a hot shower in 15 years. I can’t even imagine that.

Her home was severely damaged during Hurricane Andrew. When the money from the insurance settlement ran out, so did the contractor – leaving her with a half-repaired home and not up to code, which meant she did not have electricity connected.

She had no place to go and did not have the money to finish the work.

Somehow she managed to get a tiny amount of electricity into the house by running extension cords from outside. She was able to plug in a tiny refrigerator and a cook top and a couple of lamps.

She said she just lived with it. For fifteen years.

Last Friday, somebody got a tip of her plight and volunteers helped end 15 years of Spartan existence.

Something as simple as flipping of a switch to turn on light almost overwhelmed Norena. The rest of us do that dozens a time a day without even thinking about it.

Her first planned activity? She planned to get the water very hot and take her first bubble bath in a decade and a half.

There are at least a few lessons in this story for all of us.

The first is we should never take for granted those things that seem mundane to us. We should appreciate the people who work very hard at keeping what we call the necessities of life going for all of us.

We should never complain about having to pay for such services.

Lastly and most importantly, we should all have our eyes and hearts open to those who need a helping hand. In fact we should be actively looking and acting.

The fact that this widow lady went 15 years in the United States without power and it took only a couple of hours to fix her problem is a sign that something is terribly wrong with our society.

A society in the dark. And we are continuing in our Spartan existence. We are so consumed with ourselves that we miss the purpose of living.

Maybe we all need to turn on the light.

I have a feeling if we do there are hot showers and bubble baths waiting for all of us.