GET PLUGGED IN

Get Plugged In

A man who was employed for a time in a third world country discovered many things about his new location that would have forever eluded him had he never moved to a backward part of the world.

One of the things that stood out was the fact that although modernization had expanded globally, many of the local people were still living their lives quite primitively.

This reality was brought home to him quite profoundly one evening when he had to go back to the office after closing to pick up something he'd forgotten.

When he arrived there he found the third-world janitor picking scraps meticulously up from the floor and throwing them away. He asked him why he wasn't using the vacuum cleaner and was told that it didn't work.

The dedicated custodian got it out, and pushed it this way and that to show that it wasn't doing the job...but, he wasn't plugging it in! Because the floor was always perfectly clean, no one in the office was aware that the employee who came each evening to clean wasn't using the vacuum on the floors.

There's a good analogy here of Christians who sometimes wonder why their witness is ineffective. They think they're living for Christ but their lives don't appear to impact the people around them in any significant way.

The reason could be the same one that prevented the vacuum cleaner from functioning as it was designed to do--a failure to be plugged in to the Power Source.