God is Listening (Part 2)

As you may have realized, I decided to split the topic “God is Listening” into 2 parts. That primarily has to do with the fact that I feel like that’s the topic that lays down the foundation per se. We don’t need to fear, because God is listening. We can know that God understands us, because God is listening. The list goes on. I guess you could say that the foundation is based off of the fact that God is always a part of our lives. He never has and never will abandon us.

Something that I realized was that I’m giving examples in my life where God is doing all of the work. I thought that this might be a good time to mention a story where I felt like God was listening even though I was putting effort into getting the results that I wanted.

One thing I went through for 5 years or so was that I’d have this thing happen where, all of a sudden, my body would get all tingly and then slowly lose strength to the point where I was basically stuck in paralysis for a day. I was told that that showed that I needed to get up and exercise more. I ignored that theory though because my seizures were changing throughout time. I was certain it was just an aspect of having epilepsy. Last year made me think otherwise though.

Last year, I went to a Bible Institute with classes that were basically 8 hours 4 days a week and then half of that on the fifth day. Something I found interesting was that those paralysis moments were happening more often last year than ever before. Not only that, but it was getting more and more common as the year went on. At the time, I just pushed through it. Eventually, I started paying that Good would help me find a way to stop these moments from happening… or at least happen less often. When I came back from that school, I thought more about what was going on.

Before I went to that school, I worked as a courtesy clerk (on my feet all day). At that school, I was almost always sitting down. Also, the paralysis moments never happened while I was doing something such as playing volleyball or swimming. It would always happen when I was doing something such as sitting at the table or laying down in bed. A part of me started to wonder if it was worse last year than any other year in my life because that was the year where I found myself sitting down for the longest periods of time. Also, maybe it was getting worse throughout the year because I was going longer and longer without giving my body the exercise that our bodies generally require.

I was starting to think that I was wrong about why it was happening. Perhaps it actually was due to not exercising as much as I should’ve been. I found myself praying that that was the case. Being wrong about this could mean that it was something that could be fixed.

When I got back, I decided to try and prove myself wrong. I tried to avoid sitting down. I tried to do simple exercises… even if it was just for 10 seconds or so. Sure enough, I was originally wrong about it. It hasn’t happened since. It went straight from happening once or twice a week to never happening again.

I felt like God was listening during this time for a couple of different reasons. First off, the results changed instantly. It wasn’t like it went from each week to each month to every couple months to never again. Even though I did the tiniest bit of exercise every now and then, it made a huge change forever. Also, I thank God for helping me realize that I was wrong about it. I don’t feel like that was of my own doing. I was too confident that I was correct about it to even consider having been wrong about it. Finally, I thank God that there was a solution to what it was happening.

Sure, maybe some people won’t feel like this showed that God listens. Personally though, I don’t feel like this change in my life would’ve happened without Him.

Part 2: God is always listening and has a desire to help us, but sometimes He wants us to be a part of the story. God can do it on His own, but we shouldn’t just force God to do everything in our lives. We should be willing to change our ways if that’s what God desires if we want a change to happen.