Being Sick on Christmas

I am extremely thankful for gracious staffmates.  We share ideas.  We share lunch together each day.  We share joys and struggles in ministry.  People around here like to share.  However, I think there are some things that aren’t meant to be shared… like colds.

Despite this truth, I caught a cold just days before Christmas that seemed to be at it’s worst on, you guessed it, Christmas Eve.

I found myself sitting in the lobby during the 5:00 service trying to catch any words of Pastor’s sermon or the songs I could in between attacks of violent coughing.  I did come back for the 11:00 service prepared with cough drops, water, and Kleenex and made it through, but for this musician-at-heart it was extremely difficult to worship in silence as any time I tried to sing would send me into a coughing fit.

I say all of this not to get any pity, but rather to share what I learned through being sick this Christmas.  As I was driving home from church Christmas Eve frustrated with being sick, it suddenly hit me:

This is exactly why Jesus came!

Back in the garden, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, sin came into the world.  So often I think we focus on specific actions and call them sins.  But our view of sin and it’s impact stops there.  In reality, the entire world was broken in that moment because when sin entered the world, we were separate from God.  One of the ways the world was impacted was sickness and death entered the picture.

As I’ve been interacting a lot lately with a few friends that find themselves struggling with illnesses far greater than my stuffy nose and coughing attacks–things that aren’t going to be over in a couple weeks, sicknesses that threaten to take their lives or at least dramatically alter them– I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how/why God chooses to heal some people who are sick and let others die.  And while I don’t know the answer to that question and must simply trust that God’s ways are not my ways and his thoughts are higher than my thoughts, I find a little comfort in my Christmas Eve discovery.  Jesus came (literally on Christmas) to fix what had been broken.  For some people that means healing will come next week, for others, it may not come until they’re sitting with him in Heaven.  I don’t know why it’s different for different situations, but I do know that’s why he came.

God loves us so much that he HATES to see us sick.  He HATES to see us hurting.  He HATES to see us hurting each other.  He HATES to see us broken and afraid and weary.  And that’s WHY he came.  Often we ask “God why don’t you do something?!?” and forget that he already has done something.  He realized that in order to save us out of this crappy world, we would have to make a sacrifice.  He gave up his Heavenly thrown, lived inside a teenage girl for 9 months, was born in a stable and placed in an animal feed trough because he couldn’t just stand around and do nothing.  He grew up and lived life here on earth as if he was just another nobody in order to save all of us nobodies.   And when he was just in his 30s he was willing to die to take away the sin, the hatred, the fear… the sickness… that infects our world.  And he rose again so that one day we WILL live in a place where no one will ever catch a cold, no one will ever be diagnosed with cancer, no one will ever find themselves waiting in a doctor’s office for a diagnosis.  We’ll be healed once and for all.  🙂

Looking forward to that glorious day!