The flu caught up with my family a few weeks ago. Despite all our precautions of getting the shot, washing hands, and trying to avoid being around anyone who had it, there it was. We found out a friend we'd been around had come down with it the night before my daughter did. Then, my son was down a day later. And I fell two days after that. There's no telling where we picked it up. It could have been the same place our friends caught it. At the church building. The library. Preschool. A store. Who knows? It's all around us right now. But as rampant as the flu is, there's something worse out there. And I'm not talking about the Corona virus. As many precautions as we take to not catch a physical ailment, can you imagine doing the same thing for a spiritual sickness? We obviously can't wear funny masks or remove germs by washing skin. But there has to be something. A vaccine, maybe? What does a spiritual sickness even look like? Does it come with a fever or chills? A runny nose? Swollen lymph nodes?
Of course not. That's silly. No. Spiritual sickness is someone trusting himself more than he trusts God. It's worrying about things out of our control. It's believing we can watching something on tv for a few minutes and not be affected by it. Or not correcting a false assumption about truth because we're more afraid to hurt someone's feelings instead of whether or not it might keep them from heaven. You see what I mean? It's everywhere. So, how do we protect ourselves against it. (And I hope we do a better job than I did avoiding the flu.) We vaccinate -- aka, we steep our lives so fully in God's word that we can't mistake something fake for the truth. We wash -- no, not our hands, but we make sure we're clean in God's eyes. If we've been forgiven before, and we know we've slipped, we ask forgiveness again, knowing He washes us white as snow. We take our vitamins -- this is a lot like the first precaution. We make sure we're putting what's best into our minds as much as we do for our bodies (maybe even more). We surround ourselves with others doing the same thing -- if you don't expose yourself to the sin more than you expose yourself to the healthy, you're less likely to "catch it." This is super simplified, but it's what has gone through my mind as I've listened to people talking about how rampant the flu is this year. Yes. It's everywhere. But isn't the sin epidemic worse? How are you protecting yourself from it?
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This is a place for me to share thoughts and ideas not just related to writing. Thoughts about what's going on in my life, about an idea I got that I thought shareworthy, or just a funny anecdote.
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