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Lord?

             Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. (Deuteronomy 7:9)

 

            How fickle I am. I get sick, and my whole life narrows to my illness. I’ve written about this before, but I’m living it again. The Lord my God is God, well, yeah, of course…sure… but I’m sick. “Please excuse me from doing Your will, Lord, because I’m sick. When I’m better, You can resume Your rightful place as Lord, but right now, I want to crawl into bed. And it doesn’t matter that my symptoms today aren’t as bad as yesterday…” How little it takes for something else to become a lord.

            The point is not that God is a taskmaster, and I’m falling short. This illness is something He’s allowed in my life, and I suspect His greatest desire in it is for me to trust Him within it. That means it’s OK if I spend time in bed instead of doin the things I think I should be doing, but it’s not OK if this bug so consumes my thoughts that there is no room for God in them. But isn’t that how we are. Viruses and other things so consume our ready energy and attention that what’s important falls by the wayside unless it is something that gets in our face, like kids needing dinner. Even as we drag ourselves through the basics and essentials, our heart isn’t in it. We may want to care, or have faith, or be loyal, but when it feels as if you spent the previous day bench pressing 300 lbs and leg pressing three times that… how’s a woman supposed to get past that?

            Yes, God forgives, but if we allow a virus lordship in our lives, how are we to prevent bigger things from doing the same? We may benefit from the bigger thing being less intimate, but it’s also bigger.

            I’m not sure that what you do when you’re sick needs to change all that much. It may be completely within God’s will that you rest all day. But here’s the challenge based on this passage. What happens if you spend at least part of the time you’re flat on your back saying, “The Lord my God is God, and the virus is not. The Lord my God is God, and the virus is not”? Or, what if you pray for other people or for God to reveal Himself as a faithful God – and a loving God? If you can manage 30 seconds of denying the virus lordship, you’ve won that 30 seconds. 

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