It’s funny how you will have your mind made up and then God will come in and show you how wrong you were and make you eat your words. This has happened to me many times and just happened to me yesterday which I want to write about because my guess is that I’m not the only one that this has happened to. Adam’s Road all live in the Edgewater Hotel together like one big family in one big house. We each have our own mini apartments but we eat dinner together, watch movies together, and see each other throughout the day most of the time. When one person gets a cold or flu it is very easily spread amongst the rest of the group because we live in tight quarters, and though we take all precautions necessary to prevent hotel guests and ourselves from catching it most of the time it is inevitable and ends up with most if not everyone catching it at some point. A year back we had a very nasty cold that turned into mild bronchitis for some of us while we were restoring the third floor of the hotel, and not long after that a nasty 24-hour flu was going around too. This time there was a stomach flu that started with one of Micah’s boys, Jacob and then quickly turned on Micah. My wife Katie didn’t let them being sick stop her from helping them and caring for their needs. My thoughts were that they should quarantine themselves so they won’t get anyone else sick because I definitely didn’t want to catch the virus. I told Katie that I didn’t want to hold my nephew because he was sick and neither did I want to go into their room. I didn’t think I was being selfish by not wanting to get sick but when I put that over helping and caring for the sick people here, that’s when I was being selfish. Katie told me that she had faith that God knew that she didn’t want to get sick either but that she loved Micah and Jacob and everyone else who were catching it more than she cared about her own health and that if God wanted her to get sick, then she would and there was no way to stop that. She still took precautions to limit the germs like hand sanitizer and not touching her face but she was not going to let her worries about getting sick get in the way of helping someone else. I told her that she could do what she wants but I didn’t want to get sick so I was going to keep my distance.
That very next morning I awoke at 7:00 am with early signs of a stomach flu and just like that God humbled me as I needed Katie to care for me and help me. I started thinking about how Jesus would react to someone with sickness asking for help. In Mark Jesus is asked by a leper to touch him and make him clean. It says that Jesus was moved with pity and touched the leper and made him clean (Mark 1:40-44). To understand the significance of being asked to touch a leper we have to go to the Old Testament in Leviticus 13. This was much more than just someone sick with a flu or coughing and sneezing because of a cold, this was a nasty disease that caused the skin to fall off and leave big open flesh wounds and boils and hair to turn white and fall out, sometimes covering the person from head to foot with these sores. The person was called unclean and had to wear torn clothing and had to live alone away from everyone else, quarantined, and they had to call out “unclean, unclean” and let everyone know that they had leprosy. So Jesus cared for that leper more than he cared about the disgusting way he probably looked with his skin falling off, and touched him and healed him. I feel that God has taught me a lesson that just as Jesus says, those who lose their life for His sake will find it, and those who save their life will lose it (Mark 8:35). It’s ironic that I tried so hard to save my health and I was the one to get sick, not the others that visited the sick (Matt. 25:35-36) and helped them. And Paul reminds us in Romans 12:3 that we shouldn’t think more highly of ourselves than we ought to, but use sober judgment. I definitely was looking down on the sick and thought of myself higher than I ought to. I hope from this blog that those who read it will look into their own lives and see the ways that they can lay down their lives for their friends as Jesus laid down His life for us on the cross (John 15:13). God bless.
