{"id":4148,"date":"2024-11-01T07:46:49","date_gmt":"2024-11-01T11:46:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4148"},"modified":"2024-11-01T07:47:38","modified_gmt":"2024-11-01T11:47:38","slug":"one-small-task","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/01\/one-small-task\/","title":{"rendered":"One Small Task"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>

August 14, 2003, was the night that the lights went out in New York City.

A blackout shut down the power grid in eight states, mostly in the Northeast, and almost all of the Canadian province of Ontario.

Approximately 55 million people had no air conditioning, microwaves, or cell phones for up to 30 hours.

People had to be rescued from more than 800 elevators stopped in Manhattan office buildings. Subway trains stood in place. Service stations couldn\u2019t pump gas. A sea of humanity trudged from borough to borough as dusk settled over the city.

Stoplights hung useless in the darkness. Businesses closed. Airport security checkpoints folded.

Vendors gave away melting ice cream as quickly as they could. Restaurants unloaded their refrigerators and cooked perishable food items over portable grills out on the street, feeding hundreds of people in spontaneous block parties.

What caused this? Was it terrorism? The city, after all, was still dealing with the shock of 9\/11 less than two years earlier.

A fact-finding commission later uncovered plenty of places to point fingers. Archaic power lines, sweltering summer heat, outdated technology, and human error all contributed to the crisis. Ultimately, however, everything pointed to rural Ohio. 

The costliest blackout in human history wasn\u2019t caused by terrorists.

The real culprits were trees.

Because temperatures had soared past 90 degrees that day, every fan and air conditioner near the village of Walton Hills in northeastern Ohio was working overtime. That stressed the local power lines, which began to sag. One of the lines came in contact with a tree branch that a work crew had failed to trim. 

The line, just as designed, immediately went out of service, shifting its load to an adjacent line. System controllers at FirstEnergy in Akron could easily have compensated. But they never got the alert.

Technicians had been struggling with a bug in the monitoring software. An hour or so earlier, an employee had simply turned it off and departed for lunch.

Not a good move.<\/em>

The world quickly got a living illustration of the interconnectedness of a modern power grid. One after another, overloaded power lines shut themselves down in a cascading effect that rocketed toward the Atlantic coast in matter of minutes. The engineers at Con Edison in New York City had a mere eight seconds to respond to the approaching crash. They had barely lifted a finger when the city went dark.

Because someone neglected to trim a tree branch near Walton Hills, Ohio, and because a technician went to lunch instead of addressing a software glitch, \u201cthe city that never sleeps\u201d closed early that day.   

Many of us are associated with organizations that are committed to the transformation of life as we know it. That would include our worshipping communities, innovative not-for-profits, and benevolent corporations.

We\u2019ve dreamed big dreams. We\u2019ve identified strategic initiatives. We have Power Point slide decks that describe our next steps.

But in all the excitement, we may have forgotten something. 

We\u2019ve neglected to keep our eyes on that one small thing, that routine task that just happens to fall into our corner of the big picture. 

Like those tree branches out there along that seldom-used road.

Little things matter. Because everything is connected. The apostle Paul writes, \u201cWhatever you do, put your whole heart and soul into it, as into work done for God, and not merely for people\u201d (Colossians 3:23).

Honor the one small task on your list of things to do today. Do it with excellence.

Just think: Your faithfulness will help keep the lights on<\/em>.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here August 14, 2003, was the night that the lights went out in New York City. A blackout shut down the power grid in eight states, mostly in the Northeast, and almost all of the Canadian province of Ontario. Approximately 55 million people had no air conditioning, microwaves, or cell phones for… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4149,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[832,437],"class_list":["post-4148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-excellence","tag-faithfulness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4148"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4151,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4148\/revisions\/4151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}