Calm Crisis

Only with God are you able to experience calm in the midst of crisis. I can not say that my sister and I were the perfect example of this these past two days but I know there could have been a lot more anger and frustration if the Holy Spirit were not living in our hearts. You see Monday October 3 I woke up at about 3 am to find that my alarm clock was not even on. This is all by God's grace I was shocked enough to wake up and think to turn on my cell phone's alarm, knowing without an alarm I would wake up at the time I like to be at work.
You would think when you are on a flexible schedule you would come in late a lot. This just is not the case with me. I can come in whenever I would like to as long as I stay 8.5 hours, they give us a hour for lunch. When I am allowed to sleep in I do not want to, I want to get there, work and get home early. Now when I have a set time, I hate getting up and drag myself to work, ironic isn't it. I digress.
Back to the point, I set my alarm and wake up when it goes off, for some reason that morning it did not want to allow me to enable the snooze. I am a firm believer in waking up about 20-30 minutes or more earlier than you need to get up and hitting the snooze 4-5 times, like it is any better for you. So I reset it for 10 minutes and snoozed. I did my devotions by cell phone light. Half way through each chapter I would have to close and open my flip phone to keep the backlight from going out. By the way we just moved into our apartment Saturday so if we even have a flashlight, which I think we do not, I would not know where it is. I then called Entergy, this is about 6 am. They say they will get it on by 8-9 am (this is what I hear). They ask me to check if anyone else has power, I have no idea since no one is awake around us. When I get off the phone I check the breakers and they are all on and our neighbors air conditioning is humming at me, a cruel taunting hum.
I went to work thinking I would come home to energy. Not the case, and of course the temperature is not cool. I tried to just move some things around upstairs and could not because it was so hot, I was sweating from putting cleaning supplies in the linen closet. I called again and she said it must have been something big because it would not be fixed until 8 pm but no later. So we go to our Girl's night out and have dinner. Near 8 my sister started counting down until 8 pm when we are to have power. We get home to surprise no power. We took up our dear friends on their invitation to come and hang out with them.
My sister took a stab at calling Entergy this time. When they informed us that they will not send anyone since it is just our apartment and not the building. We are both frustrated that now 14 hours later they are telling us they have been lying to us. God wanted to teach us a lesson in patience. They tell us we will have to call the apartment maintenance to fix it. We call and this nice Southern man gets on the phone and tells us he will be over and call us if he needs us to come. About an hour later we get a call from him because low and behold our meter has been stolen. He told us to ask Entergy if they had come and taken it, I did not because why would they come with no notice at 2 AM. So again we called and told them that someone had stolen our meter. They said they considered this an emergency and would have someone out shortly. Our maintenance guy informed us that when the meter is taken out the hole it leaves has things exposed that if someone were to touch they would die from electrical shock. That would be enough of an emergency for me. I had no idea that was true.
Well two hours pass and we are still waiting so we called again and they promised us that someone would come during the night. They also argue that no one would come up and touch that so it is not that dangerous. Yeah just like no one would steal your energy meter right?
I wake up this morning and still no electricity. I went downstairs to eat breakfast and there is stuff dripping from the freezer. I look in and the meat is still cold but if it remained without energy for much longer would spoil. These are groceries we had just bought Sunday night.
I was ready to scream and act irrational, knowing I could not afford to replace that food, but that still small voice reminded me that I am to trust in God and nothing could happen to me without Him allowing it. I knew I had to rest in that but my flesh wanted to scream "Give me justice, I do not deserve this." "You owe me." In a way I am right God does owe me, He owes me eternal damnation but He has given me eternal life that I can never come close to deserving. He has not given me what I deserve, because I deserve pain and suffering, death and eternal separation from the Father. My sister called and they informed us that this was not an emergency situation and someone would come fix it that morning. If only they could stick with one story, they are going to fix it, they are not, it is an emergency, it is not an emergency. Get it together people. As I stepped out the door with the meat, to take it to a friend's house so it would not spoil, the Energy truck was there. I asked him if he was going to fix it right then and he said it would take a minute and to go ahead and put the meat back. We were more than elated to have power again. God again has provided for us.