The Burning Furnace

While getting ready for work today I realized I didn't post anything about my exciting trip to 2 power plants. I woke up at 4 am in Friday morning because I had to be at (future) bosses house at 5 am. Before heading to bed Thursday night I said a simple little prayer, "Lord, allow me to wake up at 4 am and not be late" and what do you know, I actually woke up at 3:56 am with out my alarm going off. Not only that, I was wide awake and in a good mood. For those of you that don't know, I am not a morning person it usually take me about 2 hours before I am actually awake. We left the bosses house at 5 am in arrived at our first power plant Muskingum (sp?) around 8 am. Now, I don't know if you've ever been to a power plant to see one up close an personal, but they are huge, intimidating. We got our security clearance and drove on through the gate and to the power plant, I forget which unit it was. We park the car get out and go into the building. Loud, loud, loud is all I can say. The boss had to replace a part on a boiler so we had to go down one floor to get to the boiler. It was warm, actually felt good because it was so cold outside. Everything was pretty dirty. We took care of business and went on our way. We were scheduled to be at the Conesville Plant after 12 so we had sometime to burn. We ate late breakfast at Cracker Barrel. Very yummy. We arrived at Conesville. Once again the intimidation factor set in. We recieved our security clearance and headed on our way to our entrance. This time we had to go up in the building. About 4 floors. This plant seemed to be much louder than the last one. We ride the elevator up and entered the control one to drop our coats off before getting on the elevator again to go up. When we stepped off the elevator the heat hit you. It was hot. We walked over to the boilers and it got hotter. It was probably around 100 degree by the first boiler. We then walked over to another section of the plant and the heat was intense, I'm talking about it took you breath away from you. Probably around 140. All I could think about besides look down through the grated floor to the bottom floor was about Shedrach, Meshach, and Abendego (sp?), you see in the Old Testament these three guys refused to worship King Nebakenzer (sp?) so the king told his workers to increase the heat on the furnace by 7 times. When the guards took the three men to the furnace some of them persished because of the extreme heat. In the end the three guys were not harmed because of their faith in God. God protected them while in the furnace. Amazing faith.

Talk to you later.