The Gift of Providential Affliction

This Christmas season, I purposed in my heart, I was going to be more mindful of God and not get distracted by all the holiday hoopla. I was going to create a place inside for Christ. Well, my best intentioned plans have been destructed by some other condition inside...what appears to be a viral infection attacking my gastrointestinal track. I have been dashing alright...but not through the snow, but to the nearest john. I will spare you the details. Let us just say that the last five days have been unpleasant.

Since September I have been consistently praying to God--among many other issues--that I would not allow my belly, my appetites, to rule me like Caesar's. Primary of these autocratic appetites is the eating of food. I want to appreciate good food yet not be in worship of the god of gluttony. Second, that my periodic episodes of backaches, that come and go--usually when I do something stupid to strain my back--teach me the weakness of my flesh and the folly and futility of trusting in the arm of man.

It is not like I have not prayed for many other issues, both mine and others, but these two prayers have been in the mix pretty consistently in my I-Pod-like playlist of prayers every morning. I can pronounce with absolutely no doubt that God has answered both prayer request with a two-fer whammy. Watch what you pray for as the old adage says...you might just get it.

I have been fairly ambivalent about food as you might imagine...I have had plenty of time to think about it in the commode of contemplation. The odd thing about the viral infection is that it has not only attacked my GI system but it has also given me about the sorest back imaginable. The Doctor said the virus can attack the lymph nodes in the back. This has set out San Francisco-like earthquake spasms through my lower back. I have felt like a really old man. Lina reminded me the other day that I am a really old man so now I am calling her Florence, as in Nightingale, because of her compassionate response in verbally affirming me when I am down.

As God would ordain, this week in my devotional time, I read an old Puritan prayer about "Providential Affliction" where the writer of the prayer seems to be actually praying that God would mortify his flesh through physical malady and distress, among other Job-like treatments. A time at the aps...the opposite of the spa. How different, I thought, of how we pray today that God would not deliver us in our sickness instead of from our sickness. And the greatness sickness of all is our love for sin. So, basically, the Puritan petitioner is telling God, "By all means necessary, make my sinful estate as odious to me as it is to you Lord." That is pretty radical and dangerous.

We live in difficult time, yet perhaps not really that difficult in light of how hard life has been for humanity since the Garden. The other day, on the way to work, I heard on an NPR program a single mom bewail and cry that she did not have enough money for her kids to watch television. By that, I am sure she meant that she did not have the cash to get cable. I was like, "Come on, get a freaking grip."

Although her kids had government paid for clothes, lodging, food and school, she was distraught that her two children would not be able to waste their days and nights before the vacuous screen of entertainment nihilism. How about have them study more and improve their station in life like generations before them through hard work and education? And for her to appreciate that the lack of cable makes it easier for her to encourage her children to do so rather than waste their lives in the nefarious domain of COMCAST. She is trying to better herself by becoming a nurse yet she has succumbed to the spirit of the age where mindless, negative, and destructive entertainment is seen as a necessity component of her kids happiness and well-being, when in fact it is just the opposite. I know that TV is not all bad, but much of it is, especially when it interferes with other more important tasks and activities.

So, what has God shown me through all of my maladies? Christmas can devolve into a sentiment and sappy show where everything has be Martha Stewart perfect. Our expectations of peace and prosperity underlie much of our holiday ethos...I had a good time, got some good stuff, enjoyed some good food and drink, and had no major familial arguments. Yet, the first Christmas for the three primary characters was hardly idyllic. Think about it...having to go back to Bethlehem at the decree of Rome to be counted and then taxed...a talon in the flesh reminder to Joseph the Jewish carpenter, a direct descendant from King David himself and of the royal line but now a blue collar working man, that Rome ruled the land. Mary, pregnant with God's son, but giving birth in a barn. Heck, and she is probably about 14 years old, a teenage mom. Jesus, God himself, taking on flesh...God in diapers, whose whole life will be one of sinless suffering because of the sins of others.

The whole story loses its Hallmark like sheen when we start to look at what actually was happening in detail, rather than stepping back and letting it all haze over into a bucolic affair.Yet, God worked in these afflictions to bring the Good News...through the tragedy, triumph. "Is there room for Him inside?" the song asks. Yes, there is for me but God had to take out before He could put in. By all means necessary.