I actually found the fix to this. Part of the problem is that I was doing a full deployment in Node Red instead of deploying only nodes that had been changed. The other thing I added was a ten second delay between the inject and the current state node. My inject was set to check our locations at 6pm, then turn on the lights if either of us was home (but do nothing if neither of us is home). That ten second delay gave it enough time to connect to the server if I did a full deployment-- previously I had only done a 5 second delay and that wasn't enough.
This and this gave me enough of a clue to figure out to add a longer delay.
I hope this helps anyone else dealing with this in the future!
