Connected to the Source

I had a rough morning.

We’re having some family issues going on and I’m stressed. I’m not sleeping well and I’m waking up at 5:30 in the morning, unable to go back to sleep. And, for those of you who are early risers by choice, I do not typically wake up at 5:30. That’s the middle of the night. People should be asleep at 5:30.

My youngest caught a bad cold a month ago and needed to go back on oxygen. We’re slowly weaning him off, but he needs it for now. Anyone who has never had the joy of lugging around an O2 tank, or using a concentrator, might not know that oxygen is measured in “liters per minute,” LPM. My son typically needs from .5 to 1 lmps to stay saturated. Not this morning though.

This morning I wake him up and he’s at 99% oxygen saturation which is great. I go to change his diaper, heat his food, and start to feed him, and I notice that he’s desatting, dropping down to 94%. Not good. So I turn up his concentrator from 1lpm to 2lpm. He’s still hovering and begins to drop lower. When he hits 89% and the alarm starts to go off, I’ve bumped him up to 3lpms, which is very high flow.

I reposition him, he bumps back up to 94% before starting to slowly drop. I pull out the suction machine, squirt salt water up his nose and suction him. He briefly goes up to 95% but is soon back down at 90%. I’m literally freaking out. I’m going to have to call 911. He’s going to wind up in the hospital.

And then I look, really look, at the oxygen concentrator. The tube had become disconnected. He’s been on room air for the last hour. No amount of repositioning, or suctioning, or getting him to cough was going to help. He needed to be connected to the source.

The same is true for all of us. There are so many good things that we need to be doing. Going to church. Being part of Christian fellowship. Spending time with our kids. Mentoring others. But if we’re not connected to the Source, then everything else is going to be in our own power and we all know how that ends.
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Why is this so hard? I don’t know about ya’ll, but the first thing I drop when I’m short on time is my quiet time. Someone, I think it was Martin Luther, said something like this, “I’m too busy to not have a three hour quiet time.” Of course, he said it (if it was him) in German, and he probably said it better, but you get the point. Without being connected to the Source, we’re going to fail. And if we want to make it through the day, we’d better take time to check our connection.