Onward, Forward, Toward…

a.k.a “Victors or Vicarious Vampires Part Two” in reference to this article.

This morning, I was reading this post from the Journal of Ruth where she was discussing reading a post from Internet Monk (now pulled) about the Rev. Kyle Lake tragedy and how two different people are estatic because the now deceased Rev. Lake was their poster boy of what happens to people who disagreed with them.

I had to read the links posted at the Journal of Ruth article to refresh myself on the story (I can’t believe that it has been almost ten months since this happened) and I came across a very distinct difference between the equating of the Rev. Kyle Lake story to the story of Ananias and Sapphira found in Acts 5.

Ananias and Sapphira was purposely killed by the Holy Spirit for ‘lying to the Holy Spirit’ and for also ‘testing the Spirit of the Lord’ per the Acts 5 story.

Rev. Kyle Lake was accidentally killed because the natural properties and laws of electronics, electricity, physics, and nature were violated.

In fact, author Terry Esau stated on this page that Kyle Lake would have:

said, ‘There are laws of nature, electrical laws, and they were violated that day and I was in a really bad place where the violation happened.’

That is exactly what happened here. Even though I disagree with the core motive, foundations, and ‘theologies’ being preached from the leadership of the Emergent Church, I really believe that Rev. Lake made a very bad choice (probably out of ignorance to the laws of electricity/electronics, science, and physics since usually those subjects of scientific academia are not usually offered in the curriculums of theology students) to grab a corded microphone that had live electricity flowing through it.

As one whose degree is in electronics, I know that water and electricity is a very dangerous combination. The human body has a high amount of resistance to electricity via the skin of the human body. If you sweat or have water on your body, the resistance to electrocution is drastically lowered.

When Kyle Lake went into the water to baptize people, he drastically lowered his resistance to electricity. When the human skin becomes wet, it allows much more current to flow than the dry human body would. He touched a microphone that was connected to a AC powered mixer console where there was voltage present on the wires. If the microphone was connected via an XLR connector, the shield wire of the XLR connector was connected to the earth ground/chassis wire of the AC Input (via the microphone cable) which is usually (but not always) connected to the AC input neutral wire at some point.

This probably created a situation where by touching the case of the microphone (connected to the ’shielded’ lead of the XLR connector) while in the water, the resistance of Kyle Lake’s body was lowered to the point where the voltage present was high enough to overcome the lowered body resistance to the point of sufficient current flow (it takes only approximately 10 mA of current under ideal conditions to kill someone because it is the current that kills, not the voltage) was able to take place to flow through the muscles and/or nerves of Kyle Lake. This current flow overrides the naturally small current flow (approximately 1 mA generated by the nervous system) of the human body and causing fibrillation of the heart and/or neurological impairment to happen which led to his tragic death.