Posted on 10/30/2005 5:51:37 PM PST by aculeus
A US pastor performing a baptism was electrocuted inside his Texas church when he grabbed a microphone while partially submerged, a church employee said.
The Reverend Kyle Lake, 33, was standing in water up to his shoulder in a baptismal in front of 800 people at University Baptist Church when he was electrocuted yesterday, said Jamie Dudley, a church business administrator.
Doctors in the congregation unsuccessfully performed chest compressions for 40 minutes, Dudley said.
The woman Lake was baptising was not injured, Dudley said.
Pastors at University Baptist Church routinely use a microphone during baptisms, Dudley said.
"He was grabbing the microphone so everyone could hear," Dudley said.
"It's the only way you can be loud enough."
About 800 people attended the morning service, which was larger than normal because it was homecoming weekend at nearby Baylor University, Dudley said.
Lake, who had a wife and three children, had been at the church for nine years, the last seven as pastor, Dudley said.
AP
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
ROFLMAO.
Love your synopsis of the last thread, btw. I'm still waiting for the holy rolling to start here. There are always some bluehairs who have no sense of humor about this kind of thing. As if God wants us all to sit around wailing about how awful it is people die all the time.
In fact, I hope my death at a ripe old age is in as absurd and entertaining a fashion as possible. It's not like there is such a thing as a death you WANT to die (heroic sacrifice and death in the saddle and all that wishful thinking notwithstanding), so they're all bad in that sense, anyway. It is my fervent prayer that God lets me bring a smile to people on my way out.
One of my extended family actually had brain cancer and used humor to keep her family from crying about it as she died. I'll never forget the story about her losing bladder control and having to wear Depends, and gradually lost her faculty for speech, then as a son lovingly changed her, she surpised everyone by blurting out the words "SUPER COLON BLOW!"
A friend of mine insists that he wakes up every morning and immediately says "BRAINS!" so that when he dies, his body will be trained to rise from the grave, or at least reflexively scare the pants off a mortician in a final practical joke.
If you can't laugh at death you probably can't laugh at life, either.
I like it, that's why I HANG around
And I thought I was the only one.
The sad thing is that although we can assume he didn't mind going home, his desire probably was that his death would glorify the Lord. This seems a terribly senseless way to go. I didn't even know input circuits could handle enough power to kill (though I've had some unpleasant lip-zaps from microphones).
But the Lord can, and will, work good out of anything, so prayers to that end and for comfort for the young family.
p.
I don't see anything wrong with joking about this. I mean, it's not as if the Big Guy's gonna notice, and zot you with a bolt of lig
Maybe, and maybe not.
I'm sure that this was not the first baptism of this sort performed in this church, and I would even go so far as to bet that the electrical system in this church was designed with Ground Fault Interrupters (GFI) to handle this type of use.
So what went wrong with the wiring to cause the GFIs to fail to trip? Has the possibility of homicide been considered? There is more to this story than is in this newspaper article.
Your tastes have definitely been short-circuited.
Sounds like good nominee for the Darwin Award.
southernnorthcarolina comment truncated by his own zot?
You would be surprised the U.S. stories they get Down Under. It's a tad disturbing.
:)
Non-conducting tub and plastic piping wouldn't be a bad idea either.
What? Baptize by immersion? Or electrocute themselves doing so?
-ccm
Good question. In a young, healthy person who has suffered an electrical shock or lightning strike injury, resuscitation efforts should continue longer than 40 minutes and include plenty of attempts to defibrillate. People have been revived without permanent damage 2 or 3 hours after such an injury, if they received proper care.
-ccm
Yeah. Some of us are.
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