Well our electricity went out.  It happened in the middle of the night and I woke up to the sight you see pictured before you.  (This was in our family room and those are battery operated candles.)  Fortunately it was neither freezing nor blazing hot; we have experienced power outages during both of those harsh conditions.  I worried first about our indoor fish and outdoor fish (which require motors to oxygenate the water.)  Of course the hubs FREAKED over the state of our fridge — which I bodily refused to let him open.  “WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?!” my husband hollered as my little one said she was afraid of the dark.  We now had a family state of emergency and it was my job to keep everyone from wigging out.  “It’s all going to be OK,” I said, trying to mitigate the fallout.  The American prosperity gospel televangelist Joel Osteen said:

“Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended.  But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness.  You can choose to not let little things upset you.”

And so I tried to distract them both.  It turns out we had about a ten hour wait; it could have been so much worse.  The food was saved because the refrigerator stayed closed (miraculously.)  As the sun rose my little one’s fear of the dark, quiet house dissipated into the light.  Having no power gave me time to reflect on how helpless one can become in the blink of an eye.  Secretly dying for coffee, I realized with no small amount of shame there are those all over the world who must live without power daily.  I discovered the real power was within myself — in how I chose to handle the situation versus letting the situation handle me.  From now on I resolve to use more of my own power.