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Tammy nervously walked into the medical center. After a thirty-minute wait, she was brought in to see her doctor. He opened her file and began to read a series of statistics to her: "Your pulse is good, and your blood pressure is 120 over 65. Temperature is a perfect 98.6. Your lungs are strong, and your weight falls in the normal range. The blood test identified your cholesterol to be a bit high at 210. The AIDS test came back negative, and your blood count is good. Your EKG showed a rhythmic heartbeat free of any abnormalities. It looks like you're in pretty good shape, Tammy. But I'd like you to work on lowering your cholesterol this year. Let's talk about how you can do this."
Doctors monitor our vital signs because they know that the data in these signs can help them gauge our physical health and chart our progress when we are recovering from an illness or operation. These statistics help doctors measure what we cannot see and tell us if we need to make any changes in diet, exercise, and lifestyle that we may be neglecting.
Spiritual “Vital Signs.” God wants us to learn how to check ourselves spiritually, just as a doctor checks us over physically. He wants to teach us how to keep our eyes on certain “vital signs” of the spiritual life—indicators of spiritual health that tell us how we are doing in our relationship with him. It can be easy to think that the spiritual life is too vague or “mystical” to be measured and evaluated—or that the only…
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