Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Tanya Wilmuth.

If you went to the doctor and they told you that you absolutely had to have surgery this week to prevent a catastrophic heart event, would you think twice?

I mean, would you listen? Would you just completely agree to have the surgery? That's essentially what happened to a friend of mine

this summer. He'd been putting off this check-in with a cardiologist for several months. His primary

physician had ordered a stress test, but he kept moving the appointment, and for reasons that many

of us would totally understand. A, his daughter moving the appointment, and for reasons that many of us would totally

understand, A, his daughter was getting married, and they just had a lot of family responsibilities,

and of course he didn't want to miss the wedding. And B, he had several friends he had known who had gone

in, quote, just for a stress test and ended up with stents or in the hospital, some even having surgery.

So part of him simply just didn't want to open the door to the possibility. In his mind,

they were just plenty of understandable reasons to wait a little bit longer. However, when he

finally showed up for the appointment, the situation was actually far more serious than he thought.

The doctors put him on the treadmill

and realized that what they were seeing was suggesting there was a bigger problem underneath.

So he went from the treadmill to the cath lab and from the cath lab to the hospital, and he was on a

monitor in the hospital until he had triple heart bypass surgery two days later. It all happened super, super

fast. Now, when you reach that point in a situation, you're no longer worried about your

schedule or your job or how things are going to work out. You're worried about your life.

You're worried about your physical condition. And you know you have to do something.

The desire to stay alive becomes the most important thing.

And that sense of urgency makes you reorder your other priorities in a way that nothing else can.

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