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Jesus is our power source

Tales from the front pew

Remember that cell phone commercial where the guy kept asking, “Can you hear me now?” The basic premise was the importance of a good connection. Let’s face it, without one folks are pretty much dead in the water, communication-wise.

Our family experienced this the other day. It all started when my husband, Bob, got home from work and tried to turn on the TV. One of his favorite news shows is “The Five,” which features a group of news people opining on important stories, primarily political. There’s a lot of humor mixed in, elevating the show above the more typical “doom and gloom” fare.

Sitting on the living room sofa, Bob picked up the TV remote and hit the power button. Nothing happened.

“Kim,” he bellowed (er, I mean gently inquired), “What’s wrong with the television?”

“I have no idea, dear,” I told him. “I haven’t watched it all day.”

“Well, why isn’t it working?”

Tempted to remind him that he was talking to a chaplain, and not a graduate of Big Bubba’s TV Repair School, I instead decided to offer some helpful ideas. “Maybe you should turn it off,” I suggested.

“Why would I turn it off when I’m trying to turn it on?” he asked, looking at me as if I had been at the bottom of my class at Big Bubba’s.

“I just thought that it might help. You know, turning it off and then back on again. Kinda like giving it a jump-start.”

“OK, I guess it’s worth a try,” he said, flipping the power button to “off.” He waited a few minutes and turned it back on again, to no avail.

“Well, so much for that,” he groused. “I’m gonna call the cable company.”

After he’d reached a technician and described the problem, she also began making suggestions. “Sir, have you tried turning the switch on the back of your cable box? Sometimes it gets loose,” she said.

“Kim, check the switch on the back of the cable box,” Bob told me. “Sometimes it gets loose.”

I checked. “Nope, not loose.”

“My wife says it’s not loose.”

“Hmm … how old is your cable box, sir?”

“I have no idea,” Bob replied. “I’ll ask my wife. Kim, she wants to know how old our cable box is.”

“I have no idea,” I told him.

“Neither of us has any idea.”

“Well, sir, you might need a new one. Unfortunately, this close to the holidays we won’t be able to get a technician out to your residence for several days.”

“Several days, huh?” Bob was imagining a football-free Thanksgiving, and it wasn’t a happy thought.

“Well, sir, there is one more thing we can try. Go behind your television set and check if the cable wire somehow got pulled out of the power source.”

Bob did, and sure enough the wire had been pulled out. He plugged it back in and our TV sprang to life. “We’re back online,” he told the tech happily.

Our Christian walk is like that.

Sometimes we feel unproductive and useless, but all we really need is to connect to our power source — Jesus.

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