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Running Red Lights (Please use caution with Spiritual Traffic Lights)

Read this next paragraph – a chilling description of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and think about how many times we’ve shutdown our consciences, our moral boundaries, and run the red lights:

Two electrical engineers in the control room that night, …were “playing around” with the machine. They were performing what the Soviets later described as an unauthorized experiment. They were trying to see how long a turbine would “free wheel” when they took the power off it.

Now, taking the power off that kind of a nuclear reactor is a difficult, dangerous thing to do, because these reactors are very unstable in their lower ranges. In order to get the reactor down to that power, where they could perform the test they were interested in performing, they had to override manually six separate computer-driven alarm systems.

One by one the computers would…say, “Stop! Dangerous! Go no further!” And one by one, rather than shutting off the experiment, they shut off the alarms and kept going.

You know the results: nuclear fallout that was recorded all around the world, from the largest industrial accident ever to occur.

– As quoted by Dutch Sheets in “Fight on Your Knees” pg 17.

I’d like to add a few “results” of my own:

Determining the operators’ role has been difficult, because “most of them died soon after the accident from massive radiation doses.”

Boris Rogozhkin, the chief engineer in charge of reactors Nos. 3 and 4 on the night of the blast, “spent five years in jail for the accident, one of six people convicted in widely publicized trials in 1987.”

The jump in thyroid cancer in children after the accident is one of its most tragic effects. “Over 11,000 cases of such cancer had been reported at the time of the UN press conference marking the 15th anniversary of the accident. That is ‘100 to 500 times the pre-Chernobyl rate, and the peak is not expected for another 30 years,’ said the coordinator of international cooperation on Chernobyl, Kenzo Oshima.”

The effects, to both adults and children, animals and plants and the entire region is ongoing.

All because a few men decided to ignore the alarms,have a little fun, flirt with the dangerous boundaries despite the many and loud warnings.

Are you running the red lights?

Are you ignoring the warnings, the advice, the many cautions?

“One by one the computers would…say, ‘Stop! Dangerous! Go no further!’ And one by one, rather than shutting off the experiment…they shut off the alarms…and kept going.”

Lord, help us to heed your warnings. Give us light, and the wisdom, grace and fortitude to follow it.