They Called It Over
The word for Saturday, September 12, 2026 is They Called It Over.
The anchor verses are Numbers 23:19 · Habakkuk 2:3.
Yesterday the Centers for Disease Control declared the largest recorded multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak in the United States over.
It was linked to processed iceberg lettuce from central Mexico. The final count is 12,883 illnesses across twenty-one states, 570 hospitalizations, and two deaths in Michigan. Both people who died had significant underlying health conditions that may have been worsened by cyclosporiasis and dehydration.
For comparison, 4,703 cases of cyclosporiasis were reported in the entire United States in 2019.
This is not a mild illness. Cyclospora can cause prolonged watery diarrhea, fatigue, cramping, loss of appetite, and weight loss. Symptoms can last for weeks and may return after seeming to improve.
Taylor Farms de Mexico recalled the implicated iceberg lettuce in mid-July.
Yesterday the CDC said the outbreak had ended because recent infections linked to it had fallen sharply and the recalled lettuce was no longer available in stores or restaurants.
The Food and Drug Administration is not finished.
Its inspections and sample collection at growers and the processing facility in Mexico have ended, but laboratory analysis is still pending and the investigation into how the lettuce became contaminated remains open.
So two sentences are true at the same time.
The outbreak is over.
The investigation is not.
Cyclospora makes that distinction unusually visible because the public-health picture always arrives late. Symptoms usually begin about a week after infection, and federal officials say it can take as long as six weeks to determine whether a sick person belongs to an outbreak. The last recorded illness onset tied to this outbreak was August 17. The final declaration came nearly a month later.
That does not make the declaration false. It means public health has to speak from evidence that takes time to arrive.
The people behind those numbers are not an illustration. Two families lost somebody. Hundreds went to hospitals. Nothing in their suffering was arranged to make a point here.
In Numbers, Balak has hired Balaam to curse Israel. Balaam cannot simply say what the king wants to hear. In the middle of his oracle comes this line:
God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?
The point is not that human beings should never revise a conclusion when better evidence arrives. We should.
The point is that GOD does not speak from partial knowledge.
HE does not discover the missing page later. HE does not wait six weeks for the case to enter the system. HE does not call something finished because the file has gone quiet.
What GOD promises is not vulnerable to information HE did not have when HE spoke.
Habakkuk stands on the other side of the waiting:
For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it.
Habakkuk is not promising that everything we want will eventually happen. The vision is the word GOD gave him. Its appointed time belongs to GOD, not to the impatience of the person waiting.
That distinction matters.
Somebody reading this has been told that something is over when it is not.
The treatment ended, but your body has not returned to what it was. The funeral was months ago, and everybody else stopped using the person's name. An apology was made and accepted, but the room still changes when that subject comes up.
People close files because they have to. Institutions need thresholds. Doctors finish courses of treatment. Courts close cases. Families return to work.
Those endings can be necessary without reaching all the way down.
GOD does not confuse the two.
HE does not mark your grief resolved because the calendar turned. HE does not mistake silence for healing. HE does not need you to produce one more symptom, one more scan, one more anniversary, or one more bad morning before HE knows what remains unfinished.
And HIS promise is not that every unfinished thing will be repaired on the timetable you would choose.
Habakkuk says wait for what GOD has actually spoken.
Numbers says GOD will make good what GOD has actually said.
That is narrower than promising you the outcome you want.
It is also firmer, because it rests on HIS faithfulness, not our deadline.
The outbreak tied to this lettuce is over. The contamination investigation is still open. Those are different sentences, and both can be true.
Your life can hold that kind of sentence too.
Something ended.
Something remains.
GOD knows the difference.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the two families in Michigan whose loss did not end when the outbreak did.
- 🙏 To the investigators still working after the public declaration has already been made.
- 🙏 To the one whose grief was filed as finished by everybody around them, and who has stopped correcting them.
- 🙏 To the one waiting on something GOD truly promised, who is learning the difference between HIS word and their preferred timetable.
Grace and Peace.