Reggie McNeal tells the story of how an electrical generating plant in Texas works: “First, huge shovels dig house-sized scoops of lignite coal. Pulverized and loaded onto railroad boxcars, the coal travels to a generating plant in east Texas, where it is further crushed into powder. Superheated, this powder ignites like gasoline when blown into the huge furnaces that crank three turbines. Whirring at 3,600 revolutions per minute, these turbines are housed in concrete-and-steel casings 100 feet long, 10 feet tall, and 10 feet across. They generate enough electricity for thousands of people. A visitor to this plant once asked the chief engineer, ‘Where do you store the electricity?’ ‘We don’t store it,’ the engineer replied. ‘We just make it.’ When a light switch is flipped on in Dallas one hundred miles west, it literally places a demand on the system; it registers at the generating plant and prompts greater output.” You can’t keep God’s power and grace in a jar. It cannot be stored, it was not meant to be; it can only be used as it is given. It is not to be stored, but to be lived out in the
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