An Electrifying Opportunity

Neal Nybo

A member of my church was an engineer and an officer in the Air Force during the Korean War. He had been trained as a nuclear weapons specialist. He was stationed at an underground site that tested and assembled the triggering system that detonated nuclear bombs similar to the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs and their ignition systems were then loaded onto B-36 bombers and flown over potential enemy territory.

These triggering devices were large, about as big as a bus.  They had a hundred detonators (exploding-bridgewire detonators if you must know), each one a small bomb capable of blowing a person to bits. Together, in a synchronized dance of destruction, those small detonators would crush a large uranium capsule that then, triggered the atomic blast.

Our engineer got a call to come disarm one of these triggering devices. It seems that the people assembling it had accidently armed it! Our engineer had to crawl inside this bus sized triggering device with its hundred detonators all around him in order to disarm it. Each detonator was designed to be set off by electrical current. Coincidentally, disarming it cause an electric arc. Luckily, the nuclear part of the bomb wasn’t installed yet so he wouldn’t have destroyed area 51 or wherever his secret base was, but if just one of those 100 detonators had gone off, he would have been instantly incinerated. His work was all top secret.  So while he was disarming the device, he idly wondered what the Air Force would tell his wife was the cause of death.

And, why am I telling you this story you wonder. I am telling you because this engineer was called on to disarm those triggering devices four times! On his fourth time he decided to change his line of work. I don’t know about you but I might have made that decision a little sooner!

How many times do you and I need to be prompted by God’s Spirit before we are willing to make a change? John Wooden once said, “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.” That was literally the case in this engineer’s situation. You and I may just miss the opportunities God is wanting to give us for our sakes and the sake of others. The next time you feel a small prompting in your Spirit, consider following through with it and see where it leads.

In His Name, Neal