I Can Handle That--NOT

Monday morning I awoke with a very sore throat. I knew how to handle it, of course. Get out the vitamin C, increase the garlic capsule dosage, brew the thyme tea. No problem.

Except that by Tuesday morning the throat wasn’t just sore, it was painful. That’s when I remembered the Echinacea extract.

By Wednesday evening the throat wasn’t quite so sore, but I knew "it" had gone up into my sinuses, and at about that point I remembered the dreaded saline flush. It didn’t work. Wednesday night I got maybe one hour of fitful sleep, which wasn’t so hot for someone who needs at least seven hours of really good sleep to function well.

Thursday I was pretty miserable.

Mind you, this whole time I’m talking to the Lord, asking Him to heal me, asking Him what I should do next.

Then on Thursday evening, I finally remember: "If there is any sick among you ."

Like me, most of you can probably rattle off the rest of that scripture passage without any difficulty. But the sad thing is that, like me, most of you probably have to get really desperate or really miserable for a long time before you get around to doing it. Meanwhile, you may ask God what to do, and you may ask Him to heal you, but you pull your drugs out of the cabinet or your herbal remedies off the shelf, run to the doctor or the naturopath, and then wonder why you aren’t seeing much-if any-improvement.

HELLO!

We shouldn’t need to hear an audible voice from heaven to get us moving in the direction that has been so clearly spelled out for us in the Bible. The instruction to sick persons is plain as the nose on your face. Exactly what the Lord will do at that point is never spelled out, but we do have the promise of recovery.

It took another six hours for me to see improvement, and all my symptoms didn’t disappear overnight. In fact, three days later I am finally back very close to normal health.

We can’t know what would have happened, but maybe I’d have avoided the big sinus infection if I had remembered James’ instructions earlier. Maybe I’d still be very sick if I hadn’t remembered at all.

When are we going to get it?

We don’t know what to do.

When is following God’s clearly-expressed instructions going to be our first response in every situation? When are we going to go to Him first, while being willing to jump in the muddy Jordan River, if that is what He tells us to do in order to be healed? There is no health practitioner that knows your body the way its Creator does. None of them can give you right-on instructions unless you’ve gone to God first.

It doesn’t matter if I’ve had a sore throat a hundred times before: I still don’t know what to do.

But God does.

Every time.

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