Experience Worketh Hope

I have been sick this past week.

I fear being sick for two reasons: 1) the obvious discomfort that sickness includes... especially when you are traveling, and 2) how poor of a patient I can be when I am sick. Let me assure you, at this point in my life, the latter fear is greater than the former.

Unfortunately, I have earned my reputation as a bad patient. When I was six I had to have Vitamin K shots after a normal childhood surgery. I distinctly remember that it took three nurses (one abnormally muscular for her gender) to hold me down for those injections.

Years later, when Susan and I were both hospitalized in Bolivia with hepatitis, we had to have Vitamin K shots again. It was obvious that the young lady giving the injections suffered from dyslexia of nursing technique. She pushed the needle in slowly... very… slowly...and then pushed the actual medicine in as fast as she could. I chose to respond with a true Texas cowboy yell. Doctors came running from several areas of the hospital while my assailant attempted to quiet me.

Susan and my daughters still tell stories about my prolonged episode with typhoid fever. In most of them I come off as rather irascible. I would feel worse about that except I have always wanted to use the word "irascible" in one of our updates.

Yesterday morning, in a brief chat session, my brother-in-law Vito wrote that he had many questions about sickness. I had to agree. Some days it is just plain hard to defend theologically.

Still, at just about the same time, I read the following words from one of my favorite "dead-Scottish-preachers," A. J. Gossip. He wrote the following in Experience Worketh Hope. “Of course, it all depends upon what we are praying for. If we are whimpering, and sniveling, and begging to be spared the discipline of life that is sent to knock some smatterings of manhood into us, the answer to that prayer may never come at all. Thank God! … If you are not bleating to get off, but asking to be given grace and strength to see this through with honour, ‘the very day’ you pray that prayer, the answer always comes."

What a prayer! May God give each of us the grace and strength to face with honor the challenges life brings to us. May we be good patients of the Great Physician as He works His medicine in us.