Restoration 2012: Restoring Power

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Restoration Ministry

John Bradshaw

Power

Thank you on behalf of Jesus for He wanted you to be here.

And I am prayerful and hopeful that tonight we're going to be richly blessed as we open up the Bible and look at some things that I hope will stretch us and bless us and be meaningful.

And tonight I just want to say off the bat is really an introduction to what's going to come.

Tonight is round 1 and we've got a few more rounds to go before we are done.

So this isn't the sum total of what we're going to experience together, just an opening salvo.

And I am hopeful, very hopeful, that you'll make plans to come back tomorrow night and the next night and the next night and so on and See this series through because I believe you'll be really richly blessed well, let's begin by praying and Expecting the blessing of God.

Would you bow your head with me as we pray?

Now Father in heaven, thank you that we can come to you tonight in the name of Jesus.

We are thankful that there is hope for all of us because there is a God in heaven who loves us and who gave his son to die for us.

As we come to you in your word tonight, I pray especially that you direct us.

We come in the spirit of a learner, hoping to learn, believing to learn, having faith that you will guide and direct us and grow us.

And grant that this errant, faulty human instrument might be used by heaven in these moments that heaven would impart to us all a blessing.

Guide us by your spirit now we pray gratefully and we pray In Jesus' name, please say with me, Amen.

My wife was great with child, expecting our second born, who we knew at that moment was going to be a girl, and we knew she was going to be named Shannon.

My grandmother was born on the banks of the River Shannon, And so my daughter would be Shannon.

And Shannon is just very grateful to this day that my grandmother wasn't born on the banks of the Mississippi.

Or things could have just turned out a whole lot different for her.

But it was December in 2002, Melissa was expecting, she was only days away.

And that's when something interesting happened.

And being raised in New Zealand, I wasn't, I guess by then I was, but you know I wasn't raised with the vagaries of Southern American weather.

In North Carolina in December, it can be warm.

It can be warm all the way down to the week before Christmas, short sleeves weather.

Or there could be an ice storm early in the month.

And in 2002, there was an ice storm early in the month.

And in 2002 there was an ice storm early in the month.

The rain comes down, it freezes instantly.

If the sun shines on that, it's beautiful.

It's like you're looking at a tree covered in ice and the sun shining on it.

You're viewing a million prisms and it's just gorgeous, except that ice weighs something.

I didn't know that ice could weigh so much.

We had a tree outside, It was really outside the dining room window, wasn't it?

I don't know what you call 1 of these things.

It was an Arborvitae out front and it was 1 of these, it was an evergreen shaggy looking thing And when the ice storm came, this thing which was, oh I don't know, 10, 12 feet tall, was bent over in a perfect, like a perfect upside down U.

In fact, I think the tree is still bent to this day we couldn't quite straighten it back out.

Now the Arbovitae thankfully could bend but you get some other things that cannot bend.

Our pecan trees, you know they're brittle anyway and you get some ice on them and you're going to lose branches and stuff is going to come crashing down, which is fine, unless the trees come crashing down on power lines, which invariably they do, they must.

And the trees came down in some place down on the power lines all over North Carolina as a matter of fact, and we lost power.

They brought in trucks, utility trucks from South Carolina as far away as Georgia maybe other places, these are just the ones that I saw.

And people across North Carolina maybe not the entire state but across a wide swathe of North Carolina were without power.

Now to begin with to be without power is kind of fun because it's kind of like camping and we were off work at that time anyway and so you know no big deal I guess it's easy for me to say I wasn't the pregnant 1.

But for us it was my son and I, we had a good time.

He was 2 and a half years old and we lit candles, man, you know, and we pulled out extra blankets.

So being so cold, the food in the fridge wasn't going to spoil, maybe the freezer would be a different matter, but we thought the power would come back on, no problem.

And so we lit candles in the evening and we had fun, it was lovely.

And then the next day, well the power didn't come back on.

And so we're taking the soy milk and putting it on the back step, you know, and because it's cold out there, it's not quite cold enough yet in the house.

But we are confident that any day now with all of these workers, a veritable army of them working, that the power would soon be restored.

Now by the time the next full day had gone through, it was getting a little cold in the house, so we knew what to do.

We just pulled on more clothing, another jersey or sweater perhaps, or a jacket or something.

Before long you have on 2 pairs of socks and Uggs or something like that, but no big deal, you can survive.

And then the next day it was even colder and the house was starting to get a little bit frigid and in the evening we're putting extra blankets on the bed and looking at each other and we're saying, how long do you think we can deal with this?

And remember Melissa was was expecting to have our baby girl anytime.

And eventually we broke down you know across the street and we didn't know this and they didn't know that we didn't know this or else they would have come and told us across the street and 1 over there was they had a big basement and gas heat and so for them it was it was it was Florida down there they were as happy as clams and and warm and life was going on but for us life had stopped it was cold and you can be cold and okay but it comes to a point where you can be cold and actually worry for your life now we weren't there because we knew that there were places we could go but you can freeze to death you know and So we thought to ourselves and we wondered and we said, okay, we've got to go.

And we contacted some friends from church.

We contacted Mark and Teresa and they had, I don't know what they had, they had a fireplace with wood burning and I'm guessing they had gas.

And they lived about 25 minutes away and they said, just come on over.

It was so nice to leave the igloo behind and get over to the Mosier's house where the weather was good, or at least the weather inside the house was good.

Where it was warm inside the house and they were just, you know, casually and comfortably dressed.

They had the normal amount of blankets on the bed and so forth.

And we made it to the house and it was a safe haven, it was a refuge, and it was great.

And we wondered, but what about our home?

And when in the world will they restore the power?

You see, while we were there, living in that house, existing in that house, there was 1 thing in our mind, on our mind, and that was having the power restored.

Normally if there's an outage, somebody has crashed their car into a transformer or something, you're going to get the power back on in an hour or 2 or 3 or 4.

But in an ice storm or if a tornado goes through, you can be without power.

I mean there have been people, there were people then without power for 10 days or 2 weeks.

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