How God Works

This is one of those posts I have to preface with, "Seriously, I'm not making this up!"

If you have read my blog consistently for a few months, you know that I am a developer for CNN.com and that one of my duties every month and a half or so is to work an on-call shift for 4 - 5 days. My on-call shift started yesterday at 2pm and goes through this Tuesday at 11am. Listen to this story:

I got a call at 2:15am today about some issue with one of the websites we develop. I begin looking into and I can't figure out what the problem could be. I start calling other people who are on-call in other groups that may be able to help, but no one knows anything about how to resolve the issue.

I call my boss, who is one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to work for, even at 3:30am while he's under the weather. He is very helpful, and gives me more insight into what the problem is. Yet, we still can't determine how to resolve it. Finally at 5:00am, I throw in the towel, and escalate the issue to our production systems group. I call their on-call person and notify him of the problem, and he says in short "I'll get to it in the morning." LOL! ( I get another call at 5:20am that isn't even related to my group and at this point I just feel like I'm being picked on) :-)

At around 8:30am my boss calls me for an update, and other than some pretty weird dreams, I don't have one. I do my best to wake up, and proceed to run downstairs to my laptop to find out if the production systems on call guy was able to fix anything. It looks like he hasn't even awaken from his sleep yet, because the status of the issue hasn't been updated in our tracking application. So my boss and I are back on the issue again, plugging away to resolve it.

Long story short, by 12 noon I was done with this situation. It had become too much. I called the production systems on-call and asked him to restart one of our publishing systems. He didn't see the point, but said he'd do it anyway. I thanked him and hung up feeling very frustrated and tired. Instead of blowing up or feeling defeated as I typically do in situations such as this, I closed my eyes and counted to 10. This brought on a very strong and immediate urge for me to pray to God. So I prayed. I lifted up everyone that I could think of and asked for blessings, joy and comfort in their lives. I also asked for the Lord to come to me, and guide me through this troublesome, 12-hour long situation. I spent several minutes in sincere, humble prayer.

Just as I was saying, "Amen", I got an Instant Message from one of my co-workers telling me that the issue had been resolved somehow! I said to him, "What do you mean? How?" He said, "It must have been the restart of the publishing system!". Now, he and I both know that restarting our publishing system doesn't affect the problem that we were having, but neither of us say anything about this. Now get this! I called the production systems on-call back to tell him that everything was fixed somehow, and he said, "Umm, okay, don't know how it got fixed but whatever." As I was hanging up with him, 3 of our companies big-whigs were calling me!! I answered the phone, and once I heard their voices, I had to steady myself.

They have just been alerted to this issue and want to find out what I was doing to resolve it. Can you imagine what a wreck I would have been if they had called while this issue was still in full effect? I'm pretty sure that would have pushed me over the edge. But the Lord always knows how much we can handle; He never allows us to deal with any more than we can bear...even in minor situations like this.

I just couldn't wait to share this with anyone who would read it! Our God is so loving, and ALWAYS has been and will be true to His word.