An Unexpected Detour

I had not intended to be here.

This morning I woke up, fully intending and prepared to attend church this morning.  But we had an alarm - a power failure at my work facility.  Someone always has to go check those when they happen.  Someone named TB.

That is fine, I thought.  I will go there, check it out, come home, and still be on my way to church in plenty of time. 

So I went and sure enough, the power had kicked back on by the time I got there.  I walked around and made sure all the units were on and the generator was in cool down mode.  Feeling accomplished, I sent out the results of my find, returned home, and started getting ready for church.

Just as I was turning into the driveway for church, another alert.  One of the units had lost communication.  Sigh.

I waffled - for a moment - about what to do.  Surely an hour would not affect anything.  And waffled some more.  And realized that it was part of my job to check such things - so I made a long loop and came back out to work. 

Sure enough, a breaker was tripped when the second power event occurred.  A - 80 C Freezer, which typically has pretty valuable and hard to replace samples in it.  Found the breaker, restarted the unit, and am now watching it to make sure it comes back on line.

Now, I am somewhat glad that I came in.  The unit lost approximately 5 C over the 30 minutes it was down.  Add another 1.5 hours to that for church, and that is a loss of 20 C - not completely a loss, but certainly a lot more difficult to return from and a lot less time to figure out other options.

But I am bothered.  I intended to go to church - in fact, I probably needed very much (for my soul's sake) to be here.  But instead I was confronted with this situation that needed to be resolved, which is my responsibility.

Understand, I do not in any way think my salvation hinges on a single missed attendance from church.  What bothers me is that I intended to do something spiritual and instead find myself doing something practical.

There is a lesson here - I believe that there are no coincidences and that this event was surely allowed to occur.  My concern is that there was or is something I am supposed to be taking away from this, something important - much more than simply watching a unit come back into line.