I Believe in Infrastructure Almighty

As it so happened, the lights went out while I was in the bathroom, reading. The light from the window was still plenty of light for me to keep reading, so I stayed where I was. Soon after, however, I heard the pad of little feet come running to the bathroom door.

“Dad, the lights went off,” my four-year-old son Aidan declared as if I was unaware of this occurrence. “And we didn’t even turn them off.”

Children are hilarious when the lights go out—to be more precise, when the electricity goes off. My children, at least, have the tendency to go around to every room and try every light switch, expecting—no, desperately hoping—that one of them will work. It’s quite a reasonable response, actually, since they have not yet conceptualized how electricity works. They simply know that there’s a causal chain between flipping switches and lights going on and off.

Indeed, the loss of electricity in our house inspired my daughter’s first crisis of faith. When my daughter was about 3, we lost power for an extended period of time—okay, it was something like 2 hours. After she went around trying all the lights and after we had lit candles and encouraged her that this was really quite an adventure, she remained unconvinced. Eventually, in order to put her a bit more at ease, we decided to pray to God to restore power. Lo and behold, in a matter of ten or so minutes, the light came on and my daughter declared that our prayers had worked.

The connections between electricity and God don’t stop there. As a high school senior, as a way to argue for the existence of God with the exchange student we were hosting at our house, I once was led to use a comparison with electricity: We don’t doubt the existence of electricity, the argument went, just because we can’t see electricity itself.

Hopefully, back then the reference was a little sharper. Still, the point is that we don’t doubt a lot of things that operate unseen: from electricity to radio waves to viruses. Not seeing is not a reason for not believing.

Sitting in a coffee shop in Luverne, Minnesota, this past Monday, cut off from my children by a blizzard that made a very well built piece of infrastructure—US 75—impassable, I was more interested in how exactly it is that we believe in electricity, how we believe in infrastructure. I’ve taught my children to pray, taught them the truths and clichés that our warm houses and bodily health come from God. Still, because electricity and warm houses are so (seemingly) darn reliable, haven’t my kids learned practically to believe in electricity?

On the news this past weekend I saw a story about the electricity being out in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Predictable, I said to myself, that the rural poor would be the ones to be without electricity. It’s no secret that the Rez—almost no matter what Rez we’re talking about—is an out of the way place, both physically and economically, and so it’s also the first place to lose electricity and the last place to have it restored. The story focused specifically on an elderly woman who needed oxygen and whose needs got complicated by the situation. Scary. Then they interviewed the lady herself who seemed unperturbed. Her face was graven with wrinkles and she wore glasses and was missing teeth. “I’m a survivor going way back,” she said, chuckling.

I don’t doubt it for a moment. Survival as triumph has been a rallying cry for besieged Native American populations for years. I also will bet that that Native grandmother doesn’t believe in electricity, doesn’t believe in infrastructure.

In Haiti, of course, we watch nightly the story of the lack of infrastructure, and of the obliteration of what infrastructure there was. “How can people believe in a God who allows this?” I hear a reporter ask, “And yet worship services continue.” He seems surprised. What else is there? When the ground shakes and the infrastructure around you crumbles and the electricity goes out, what else is there to do but pray?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very thankful for power lines and utility crews, for good roads and stoplights and police to make people obey the stoplights. Infrastructure is a wonderful thing. But it’s a short jump from liking infrastructure—liking that lights turn on when we flip switches—to believing in that infrastructure.

No, for my children’s sake, may we have just enough power outages to teach us faith in something besides infrastructure.