Disconnected

I can recall one day when I had a time sensitive e-mail I needed to send out. I logged on to my computer, typed up the e-mail, completed the attachment, entered the recipients, reviewed it and finally pressed send. What I was used to seeing after a few short seconds was a confirmation message saying the message had been sent. On that particular time, I saw something I had never seen before. I got an error message that said, “Message cannot be sent at this time due to connection error.” I literally tried probably about thirty times to reconnect with no success. In the few times that I was able to reconnect, I must have attempted to send that e-mail at least a dozen times without any success because the connection was too short-lived. Just when I thought my e-mail was working, I realized it wasn’t because it had disconnected yet again.

Now, I had been mentioning to others for over a year that my internet connection was poor, but they weren’t concerned about it because they hadn’t felt affected by it. I, on the other hand, experienced it on a daily basis being that I worked from home most days at that time. I grew increasingly more and more frustrated by the lack of connection every day, but since I had been dealing with it so long I had learned ways to get around it in order to maintain some level of productivity in spite of my efficiency being extremely impacted. On that particular day, however, the tactic of just working on something else until the connection was back up was of no use. The time just continued to tick away and the hope of getting that e-mail out on time to the person who needed it, continued to fade by the minute. Eventually, a new reality began to set in. Being disconnected when it only affected me was one thing, but being disconnected when it affected other people was much more difficult. Being disconnected when it affected me, and it affected other people, and I couldn’t do anything about it… now that was just shy of unbearable. Finally, after over an hour of attempting to send the same e-mail, it finally went through. It was well after the time I wanted it to go out, but I had to trust it got there in God’s perfect timing.

This experience proved to be a very valuable lesson for me. Just because I experienced something I had never experienced before, didn’t in and of itself mean I did something wrong. Even though I wasn’t the one that caused the disconnect, I had to realize that I still needed the connection. When the reconnection was only short-lived, I couldn’t get discouraged and give up because then instead of experiencing a delayed victory, I would only experience an immediate defeat by forfeit. When there was nothing that I could do to bring about the reconnection, I had to just wait on God’s perfect timing. And then, after going through all of that, when the reconnection finally happened and the e-mail finally went through, the victory was just that much sweeter because I knew all that I had to go through to get to that point.

We have a tendency to take things for granted when they happen easily for us. But, when you have to go through something to get your desired end result, we tend to appreciate it just a little bit more. So… who or what have you disconnected from?  How long have you been disconnected? Have you given up hope or are you willing to keep trying as you wait on God’s perfect timing? I encourage you to persevere because defeat due to forfeit tends to make you feel hopeless. But victory, due to perseverance, tends to make you feel powerful!

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