I’ve felt sick the last few days.\u00a0 It’s nothing, really.\u00a0 I have a cold, or a touch of the flu.\u00a0 It will pass within a week almost certainly.\u00a0 It has been hard to focus, and since I very rarely had headaches growing up, I’ve never really learned to cope with them very well.\u00a0 A bit of nyquil and a bit of rest and I’ll be on the mend soon.\u00a0 For me. my wife was the carrier of this particular malady, but I know how she came by it, and these things do happen.<\/p>\n
It is easy for sickness to overtake you.\u00a0 Viral and bacterial infections are built to spread, replicating themselves in some unwilling host until they find a new vector to expand into a new host.<\/p>\n
In the same way, hatred and rage are diseases built to spread.\u00a0 They often grow quietly inside of a host, waiting for a way to express themselves to the outside world, spreading as they do.\u00a0 \u00a0 We’ve created new vectors, new disease paths for this hate to grow and spread, although we usually just call it social media.<\/p>\n
My cold (assuming this a viral pathogen) is not cured by the medicine I take, instead the medicine is simply masking the symptoms while my body fights the infection.\u00a0 In the same way, we often choose to hide our hatred in subtle ways.\u00a0 We mask the fact that we are filled with rage in interactions with those around us.\u00a0 It may look like we have been cured, but it isn’t so.\u00a0 We’ve only hidden the symptoms of our true feelings.<\/p>\n
In physical sickness, sometimes healing just takes time.<\/p>\n
In this emotional sickness, we have to seek out help.\u00a0 We have to purposefully choose to remove the infection from our lives, there is no automatic process.\u00a0 There is no antibody for hatred.\u00a0 We can not simply wait for our feelings to subside, as the disease still lurks below the surface.<\/p>\n
God asks us to love our neighbor as ourselves.\u00a0 He then has the audacity to ask us to pray for those who persecute us, to do good to those who harm us.\u00a0 \u00a0We are to return peace for pain, love for hatred.<\/p>\n
It’s tough medicine.<\/p>\n