The Backup Was Already Cut
The anchor verses are Daniel 2:42 · Colossians 1:17 (NIV).
On Monday morning, a construction crew in New Jersey accidentally cut a fiber-optic line used by the Federal Aviation Administration. At a Philadelphia air traffic control facility, a primary communications circuit failed. When the system needed its backup, the backup line was broken too.
The FAA paused incoming flights at major airports in the Northeast. Thousands of travelers were delayed or had flights canceled. Crews repaired the lines, and operations resumed later that day.
The backup was already cut.
That is the part I keep returning to. A safeguard can look reassuring on a diagram. Its condition matters when the first line fails.
The investigation into who marked the cable and how it was damaged was still unfolding as this word was prepared. The public accounts establish the paired failures, but they do not tell us precisely how long the backup had been unavailable before the primary circuit failed. They do not let me say that only a catastrophe could have revealed it.
The people affected were more than a flight count. Travelers missed connections and plans. Controllers, crews, and repair workers had decisions to make under pressure. I will not turn their day into a sign sent to teach me a lesson.
It does give me an image to carry into two passages of Scripture.
In Daniel, a king dreams of a great statue. Daniel interprets its materials as a succession of kingdoms. The feet and toes are partly iron and partly clay.
As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle.
Daniel 2:42, NIV.
The verse names a divided kingdom with strength and fragility in the same structure. It does not predict an aviation outage or explain its cause. The image asks me to look beyond the imposing height of the statue and notice what bears its weight.
Then Paul says something different about CHRIST:
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:17, NIV.
Paul is speaking about CHRIST's place in creation. He is not promising that human systems will never fail, or that people who trust HIM will never be stranded. The flights on Monday are evidence enough that systems need care, redundancy, and accountable repair.
But I have been treating GOD as the spare line in parts of my life. I reach for HIM when the arrangements I have counted on stop working, as though HIS presence begins at the moment I discover a failure.
Paul points my attention further back. CHRIST is before all things. The language of holding together is not a description of equipment that needs to be activated. It is a confession about who HE is.
That makes me ask a practical question too: what have I assumed is sound simply because I have not needed it lately?
The person I tell myself I could call, without having stayed in touch. The savings I have not looked at since costs changed. The conversation at home that keeps being postponed because things appear fine.
Those are not reasons to spend the day frightened or to audit every relationship. They are invitations to pay attention, tell the truth, and care for what has been entrusted to us.
Somebody reading this already knows a support has failed. You need a person, a working system, a safe route forward. A verse is not a substitute for that help. Asking for it is no failure of faith.
I can ask for help where it is needed. I can be more honest about the limits of what I have built. And I can pray without pretending that GOD was waiting offstage until I ran out of options.
The backup was already cut. The repairs still mattered. The people doing them still mattered.
And CHRIST, Paul says, was never the backup.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
🙏 To travelers whose plans were interrupted, and to those whose urgent journeys could not simply be rescheduled.
🙏 To controllers and crews who worked to keep people safe, and to workers who repaired the damaged line.
🙏 To the person whose margin has quietly narrowed, and who needs room to ask for practical help.
🙏 To those responsible for finding what failed and making the system stronger for the next day.
Grace and Peace.
Sources: Reuters, September 21, 2026 · Reuters follow-up, September 22, 2026 · Daniel 2:42 (NIV) · Colossians 1:17 (NIV). Scripture quotations: New International Version (NIV).