Fictional Story
Context: Hurricane Helene, 2024
Once upon a time, in the small town of Little Creek, there was a power outage so notorious that it became known as the “Great Blackout of ’24.” It all started on a calm Sunday afternoon when everyone was preparing for a relaxing evening. The town’s only pastor, Reverend Harlan, was putting the finishing touches on his sermon titled, “Let There Be Light,” ironically enough.
As the reverend stood in front of the mirror practicing his most powerful hand gestures, suddenly – *zap* – everything went dark. The power was out, and not just in his house, but in the entire town.
Reverend Harlan’s first instinct was to call the local power company. He grabbed his cordless phone, only to remember that cordless phones don’t work when there’s no power. So, he reached for his cell phone. The battery? Dead. “Of course,” he muttered.
Undeterred, he decided he’d get to the bottom of this by heading to town hall. As he stepped outside, he saw a crowd of confused neighbors standing on their porches, holding flashlights and candles. They looked at him as if he, the man of God, might have some divine insight into why the power was out.
“Well,” Reverend Harlan began, “I was just working on a sermon about light, and the Good Lord decided to give us all a little taste of the other side.”
The crowd chuckled, and the reverend felt a bit of relief until he heard Mrs. Beasley yell from her porch, “You mean to tell me you’ve preached us right into a blackout?”
Word spread quickly, and soon everyone was convinced that Reverend Harlan’s sermon was so powerful that it knocked out the town’s electricity.
Meanwhile, the local power company’s technician, Ed, was on his way to fix the issue. Now, Ed was a man who had seen his fair share of electrical problems, but he’d never faced one that was supposedly caused by divine intervention. When he arrived at the power station, he found the source of the problem: a squirrel, charred but somehow still hanging onto a power line, looking more surprised than guilty.
Ed managed to fix the line in record time, and just as the lights flickered back on, Reverend Harlan was in the middle of saying, “And let there be light!” He paused, shocked, as the entire town erupted into applause, convinced that their pastor had literally brought the power back with his words.
For weeks afterward, people would stop Reverend Harlan in the street and say things like, “Pastor, I’m having trouble with my washing machine. Mind preaching over it?” or “I’ve got a stubborn lightbulb. Can you bless it back to life?”
And so, Reverend Harlan learned two valuable lessons that day: First, always charge your cell phone, and second, sometimes, the most powerful sermon is the one you didn’t even know you were preaching.
