Just like jam goes with bread, skill goes with the ability to diagnose. You don’t want one without the other.

A mechanic who is highly skilled at fixing cars is of great value. But if he struggles to diagnose car problems, that won’t bode well for the car owner no matter the mechanic’s skill. That car will be on the hoist for a long time and, in the end, it will cost more to fix the car than it should.

Skill is important, but being able to diagnose a problem or identify what’s wrong is crucial to the outcome.

Being able to quickly see the problem is an ability that not everyone has. 

It takes more than physical skill; there is deep knowledge, intuition, experience, logic and creativity that all come into play. 

Not everyone possesses all these attributes or at least in abundance. 

A couple of weeks ago, my wife, Lily, was experiencing some stomach pain. It wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t going away and was even getting a little worse. 

A few days into it we talked about what it might be. Was it some kind of stomach bug, maybe something she ate? 

I asked her if there was any specific pain and she did say it was sore down on her lower right side. So I replied, “Could it be your appendix?” 

Lily brushed it off. She didn’t think the pain was that significant and that the pain was not isolated in any specific area. 

But a few more days later, things weren’t getting better. In fact she was more uncomfortable. So we decided to go to the hospital emergency department. 

That happened to be at about 8:40 pm … and possibly it was a full moon that night because the emerg was hopping.

There was no place for Lily to sit and, though she told the intake person what her pain was, she didn’t get triaged for almost two hours. 

At 10:30 pm she eventually was able to get into the system and join the sea of humanity in the waiting room. 

She managed to find a chair, while she watched others be taken into the patient examination rooms. 

At 3:15 am she was finally brought in for examination. However, there were no cubicles available so she was placed on a gurney beside the nursing station. 

At 5:00 am she was finally examined by a doctor who ordered a CT scan, and at 7:30 am the results came back that she had a ruptured appendix. 

… That’s a long time from entering emerg to identifying the problem. Sure, some of it was due to the volume of people there that night. But a good part of the reason it took so long for Lily to be checked out is the triage personnel’s inability to diagnose the severity of the issue.

Lily’s on a slow road to recovery now, but I wonder how much better it would have been if someone had have diagnosed her issue sooner. 

Here’s the thing: We like to diagnose when we have problems or trouble in our lives. We will say it is because of this or that. But there is one who has perfect skills and never fails to diagnose a problem correctly – God. Go to Him with your trouble and He will set you on the right path every time.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What have you diagnosed incorrectly in the last month? Leave your comments and questions below.

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