In The Dark


 

We had a stormy night recently. That may not sound newsworthy, but this one was considerably stormier than most. It was a keep-you-up-at-night kind of storm. I still don’t think it matched a typical Missouri thunderstorm, but it enough wind to knock out our power around 2 a.m.

I had a Zoom interview in the morning that I had scheduled about a week prior. I couldn’t zoom on my computer without Internet, and there’s no Internet without power to run the router. But I could still do the interview on my phone, and I became proficient at taking notes in darkness long ago. Looking at my notebook, you wouldn’t be able to tell which pages I wrote in darkness and which ones I wrote with light… you wouldn’t be able to read either one. But it makes sense to me.

The Interview was at 9 a.m., which is 7 a.m. Washington time. That’s well before sunrise, so I fired up three candles on my desk so they could see me on my end of the conversation.

I did feel sorry for the people I was interviewing. We were talking about an amazing recovery ministry called Breaking Bonds that is part of a United Methodist Church in Southeast Missouri. But as I was asking my questions, I looked more like I was there to tell spooky ghost stories.

The interview concluded just before sunrise, and a few minutes later the power came back on, shortly followed by Internet service. 

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