Author Steven Lake
  
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A divine timeout from God
Wednesday, January 26th, 2022 12:43am
Keywords: Work, God Encounter, Break, Timeout, Project, Upgrades, Life Lesson
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    If someone ever doubts that God moves in our lives in some fairly divine, and amazing ways, they're missing out on all the things God is doing in their life.  This includes protecting us from ourselves sometimes.  Case in point.  And I'll prefix this by saying, if this story sounds overly nerdy or hyper technical to you, I apologize.  I'm a software developer, and Linux admin.  So forgive me for the nerd tsunami that's about to burst forth, and bear with me as this will all make sense in the end. :)  Anyhow, I spent roughly 6 hours on Tuesday, the 25th, from about noon to 6pm, working hard on upgrading one of my two workstations (I run a dual workstation setup for my Linux administration, and software development work, with one machine being a sandbox to protect the main workstation in case something bad happens), which is always a very stressful task for me as both workstations are mission critical for what I do.  So there's a lot of stress involved in ensuring that I get this right.

    Anyhow, whenever I do a major workstation upgrade like this, I begin by upgrading the sandbox workstation first, dry run it for a while to be sure everything is good, and then follow this up by upgrading the main workstation once I know where all my bugs, pitfalls, and other concerns are, and what things need to be addressed during the upgrade of the primary workstation.  So anyways, for the first four hours of this process I fought that machine, tooth and nail, trying my best to solve one issue after another (this is a normal thing for me, given how specialized my setup is), completely stressing myself out as I did (again, that's normal for me during high impact upgrades like this.  hehe) and at about the four hour mark, suddenly my internet went completely away, stopping all of my work dead in its tracks.  I was stuck, and could not do anything more until that came back.  So I watched it, tested, and tried to figure out what was wrong, while following a normal path of troubleshooting.  Eventually I discovered that Comcast was totally down.

    It was at this moment that I realized what was up.  God was telling me to stop what I was doing, go outside, walk around the block, and take a break.  In short, I was being put in timeout to decompress a little before finishing up my debugging and setup.  The thing is, He'd already been telling me to take a break well before this.  But, once I get in my "on a mission" mode, I rarely stop until I succeed at what I am doing.  That's the workaholic in me.  Don't stop until you finish, no matter what it requires, or how long it takes.  However, God had other plans for me, and eventually He stopped asking, and just flat out told me, you're taking a break whether you like it or not.  So I did.  ^_^;;  After coming back in from my walk, I was able to knock out the last three items I needed to fix, but wasn't able to find a solution for before my break, and I did so in pretty short order.  So, the cliff notes summery here is, God let me run for a while and do everything I could to complete my tasks.  But, when it got to be too much, He put me in timeout so I wouldn't pop a fuse. ^_^;;

    Anyhow, I thought you'd get a chuckle out of this fun little life lesson.  Me, the workaholic, being put in timeout by the Almighty to preserve my sanity. :D ;)  And it's not the first time He's done that.  I just found the method by which He did it this time to be rather humorous, and somewhat befitting a computer geek workaholic like me. ;)

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