Jun
24
The Death of Crispy
Filed Under Devotional
Last night, I felt like I was part of a living example used to explain Scripture. That’s happened before, but this time it wasn’t as embarrassing.
We arrived at our church for a prayer service to find that the power was out. The staff had quickly gathered candles to give some light to the sanctuary and the band was replaced with our associate pastor playing piano. At the beginning of the service, he explained the power outage. The only building affected was the church building. The repairs wouldn’t be finished until close to midnight. It almost seemed targeted right at our service.
It turned out that an unfortunate squirrel had made the mistake of touching two points of a transformer on a pole behind our building and basically exploded. His hairless, flaming body fell to the ground which then lit the dry grass on fire and, eventually, lit the original telephone pole on fire. It was all put out, but the squirrel (we later named him Crispy) was toast and the power company was working on repairs less than 100 feet outside our sanctuary. In spite of the death of Crispy, over 400 of us sang and prayed.
We jokingly hypothesized about whether it had been Satan who sent the squirrel in an attempt to derail us or whether it had been God who sent the squirrel to make our service more intimate and more powerful. Either way, God worked it out.
In the event that it was an attempt at disruption, though, I was reminded of Joseph’s observation of God’s control of everything:
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” Genesis 50:20
The worship was amazing. The prayer brought many tears. God moved. We left the church invigorated and thankful for the sacrifice of a squirrel.