While the porch light still shines and the Christmas tree yet declares its brilliance through our living room window, the front of the Sandberg house is otherwise dark. The white lights my son and I installed to illuminate our home for the season of Christ’s birth are now extinguished, courtesy of a rainstorm that shorted out the circuit in our garage.
I followed the deluge with a quick interwebs search and found Beacon Home Services (no endorsement intended, but the name is inadvertently relevant). After a thorough inspection, our diligent master electrician, Jacob, a well-spoken man in his early thirties, explained that the circuits in our nearly 60-year-old Northern Virginia suburban home do not meet the exacting standards required by modern building codes. We fall short.
Those with an expert eye (such as Jacob) can discern from this photo of the inside of our circuit box that wires from multiple circuits share the same points on the panel (and less evident, but just as concerning, the whole system is grounded to our plumbing rather than grounding bars in the earth)–essentially an electrocution or house fire waiting to happen, should we ever undertake minor home repairs or even shower during a lightning storm. Ugh!
Because our home passed inspection when we bought it five years ago, I was blissfully ignorant of the problem; the shiny exterior of the breaker box masked the shortcuts and perhaps even malfeasance perpetrated during a home remodel years ago. Apparently, I needed a blackout event in my life to expose the mortal dangers we faced.
I cannot help but feel frustration that we must spend many dollars on repairs to make our home safe, but a moment of reflection also prompts me toward thankfulness.
Thank you, Lord, that you used a power outage to allow the master electrician to work an act of potentially life-saving repair. You use the challenges, expenses, frustrations, losses, and even tragedies for our own good, in ways we do not understand at the time. Not for nothing is it called Providence.
(It’s been a little while since I posted. Life has intervened in unexpected ways….thanks for reading.)
