What Does it Take for God to Get Your Attention?

 
Then Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and the high priest Joshua son of Jehozadak, along with the whole remnant of the people, obeyed the Lord their God. They responded favorably to the message of the prophet Haggai, who spoke just as the Lord their God had instructed him, and the people began to respect the Lord. Then Haggai, the Lord’s messenger, spoke the Lord’s announcement to the people: “I am with you,” decrees the Lord.  Haggai 1:12-13

 My health challenges have been many and varied over my adult life. You would think with so much experience; I’d have my priorities in order when I encounter a new kink in my system. Unfortunately, though, I’m afraid I mirror the history of the Israelites in my own life far more than I would care to admit. Now I’m not saying that God sent me Lyme disease or EDS or a brain tumor, or anything else as a punishment. What I am saying, though, is that God knew they were coming to me. Whether He sent them, they were part of His design for me, or He just foreknew that over the course of my life I would encounter them, He knew about them. They were a part of His perfect plan for my life. Now, I’ll admit, there have been times where I didn’t feel like that design was perfect, but when my head is on straight, I can see that God uses all things for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28).

 Most recently I’ve been experiencing the joys of Pre-Diabetes. My doctor recognized where I was at initially, thankfully, and rather than upending my life with a lot of change while I was healing from brain surgery, she had me start on medication to help manage my blood sugar. The thing is, God had other plans. Turns out upending my life a little more was what was going to be best and get me closer to His purpose, so He allowed the medication to make me more sick than it helped. In fact, because of my various conditions, none of the medications were available to me. So, I needed to learn to manage my blood sugar with diet and exercise. Funny thing, I’d been praying fervently that God would help me with my weight gain post-surgery. You think the two could be related?

 My first reaction to dealing with my blood sugar was to math it out. I just needed as much data as I could get my hands on and then I would be able to solve the blood sugar puzzle. The catch to that is the more data I got, the less any of it made sense. And then things started going haywire. My Visible tracker that I’d come to depend on to guide me in choices for managing my energy stopped measuring correctly – for weeks. Yes, I contacted support and did all the things, and we got it to work for a few hours at a time, but overall I haven’t had that tool at my disposal. Then my constant glucose monitor (CGM) stopped working. I had noticed a pattern where I would get a false low reading within 24 hours of putting a new one on, but this time it bottomed out and never came up. For hours and hours, it kept sending me warnings saying that my blood sugar was crashing and I was going to die. Guess what, I didn’t. Eventually, overnight, it gave up the ghost and just said, “Sensor Failed”

 If you know me, you know that I have spreadsheets on this. Spreadsheets of spreadsheets. I have side-by-side comparisons

I have data coming out my ears!

 And you know what the data tells me? Very little. So far, what I can discern is that diet and exercise is the best treatment option for me based on my body’s reaction. Also, I’m not eating too much, I might be eating too little. Beyond that, it feels like the data has made more mysteries than it has solved.

 Why do I mention all this? What’s the lesson? I was relying on the data, instead of on God. He was giving me one more opportunity to lean in and trust Him and I was like, “Nah, I got this!” It’s a delicate balance between being a good steward of what God has trusted me with and focusing more on that than I am on God.

 In Haggai’s time, the people had been sent back to Israel from Babylonian exile so that they could rebuild God’s temple. They had to be excited, and when they got back they set to work getting settled in. There was probably nothing inherently wrong with this, they had to have somewhere to live while working on the temple. The problem was, they never stopped settling in. They got focused on their day to day, their lives, their homes, and lost track of what they were supposed to be doing, building God’s home.

 I think I’ve been guilty of this too. There probably wasn’t anything wrong with me learning about Pre-Diabetes and figuring out how to change up my diet and exercise, but I just kept doing it. I just kept learning more and more and more. I got sucked in and overwhelmed by the data. I started grasping at straws and searching for patterns that probably weren’t there. I started to despair of ever figuring it out. And during this process, the data started breaking down. I started losing my ability to get the data I thought I needed to solve the puzzle. Panic upon panic, despair, loss of hope. Oh, wait, maybe God’s trying to tell me something…

Here’s the Thing: Even after decades of walking with Jesus, I seem to miss what He’s telling me for way too long. Just like the Israelites just kept trying harder, working harder, while the drought was underway and they got hungrier and hungrier. It wasn’t until Haggai pointed out to them that God was trying to get their attention that they got it. The miracle is that they listened. They didn’t always in their past. Neither did I. But hopefully I’ve got it this time and I’m cued in to listen to God now about this.