Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in
truth. 1 John 3:18
I recently read an article that began with the following paragraph:
Change or Die. What if you were given that choice? … What if a
well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make
difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If
you didn’t, your time would end soon—a lot sooner than it had to.
Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered
most?1
According to the article, the odds are nine to one against you changing—
even in the face of certain death. The author based that statistic on a wellknown
study by Dr. Edward Miller, former CEO of the hospital at, and
former dean of, the medical school at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Miller
studied patients whose heart disease was so severe they had to undergo
bypass surgery—a traumatic and expensive procedure that can cost more than $100,000 if complications arise. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties.
These procedures provide a real chance for change for the patients. Because of the surgeries, they can now, through lifestyle changes, stave off pain and even death, if they’re willing to act on the opportunity.
But they don’t, says Dr. Miller’s research:
If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two
years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle. And
that’s been studied over and over and over again. And so we’re
missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a
very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle,
for whatever reason, they can’t. In our lives, if a sudden awakening calls attention to our heart disease, I hope we realize something is wrong. Following that, we have to allow brutal honesty to do its work in our hearts—essentially bypassing the lies we’ve
believed or told ourselves. Then we, like the heart patients, have an
opportunity to act. Put another way, awakening happens to us, honesty happens in us, but nothing really changes unless action comes out of us.
