So here we are, 10 pm on Sunday, October 4th, getting close to Thanksgiving, and by the time you read this, we’ll be even closer, and I know what you are thankful for this year: electricity and a capable government agency, BC Hydro, to manage it for us. But before we get into the thankful aspect of electricity, I am curious to know how many times you turned on a light switch while the power was off during the outage? And if you are telling the truth, it was more than once, wasn’t it? Such creatures of habit we are!
But of all the things that make life easier for us all, few things can compete with electricity. I don’t think my wife would trade me for electricity, but I would just as soon she didn’t have to make that decision.
Fourteen hours was a long time to be without power. But there was one thing about it: we knew it was going to come to an end. My first six years were spent on an Alberta farm where the power never went out because there wasn’t any power to go out, as was the case for much of rural western Canada until the late ’50s or ’60s. And a power outage of several hours does bring things back.
I remember how the house would often be almost pitch black before anyone would light a lamp. It wasn’t an issue of trying to save lamp fuel; it was just that, just like now, all the grownups were busy, and it didn’t get done until it was an absolute necessity.
Light, though, is an obvious thing to think about when the power is out. One of the more insidious things, though, about not having electricity are some of the side issues. Unless you had water pressure from gravity, which few do on the prairies, you don’t have indoor plumbing without electricity.
And that brings other side issues. I don’t know why they did it, but my parents built our outhouse in the barnyard, close to the chicken house. That’s not an issue unless you’re four years old and there’s a rooster who likes to chase kids. You don’t know what fear is until you are four and you know that that rooster is waiting for you just outside the chicken house! And if you make it past there and reach the outhouse, there’s always the return trip to worry about. Electricity bringing inside plumbing changed all that.
So this year, after a fourteen-hour power outage, I am thankful for electricity and yes, for those who manage it and keep it up and running. In our case, that’s the folks at BC Hydro.
While most of us are probably not as thankful for many of the things in our lives as we should be, it is also interesting that thankfulness has many sides, some we don’t expect.
My wife saw a documentary recently on the life of the famous hymn writer, Fanny Crosby. She was a hymn writer who wrote the lyrics for over eight thousand hymns. Not the music, just the words. Any book that claims to be a hymn book has songs in it written by Fanny Crosby. Every church sings them.
All of that is not too unusual; famous people do famous things all the time, that’s why they’re famous. But Fanny Crosby was blind. She couldn’t write down the words to her songs; she had to wait for someone who could write to come along and put them down on paper. And here’s the interesting part.
When she was old, someone asked her if she could live her life over, would she wish that she had sight. She said no. No! How could you say no to such a marvellous thing as sight? But her answer is convincing. She said that her blindness allowed her to focus on her hymn writing without being distracted by the interesting and beautiful sights that vision would have given her. In other words, she was thankful for being blind. That may be a story at the extremity of thankfulness, but that is how she saw it.
Ray Charles was similar. You know Ray Charles, the great piano player and singer who has more Emmy Awards than you and I have dollars. This is a music story too, but when asked to comment on his blindness, he hardly commented on it at all. His concern is not for the blind, but for the deaf.
“Don’t worry about us blind guys,” he said, “our deaf brothers are the ones who can’t hear to talk to anyone, who can’t hear the music; it’s them that we have to be concerned about! About himself, he said: I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to hear. It was one thing not to be able to see, but a travesty not to be able to hear. And interestingly enough, Ray Charles put much of his wealth toward assisting the handicapped, most of it for the deaf.
I wonder if the people who first celebrated Thanksgiving Day did so because of the blessings they had received, or if it might have been because they knew that both they and we might be somewhat deficient in that part of our character which includes gratitude. It may have been this last part, and only you and I can fix that, but we can fix it if we try.
