Sickness

It's a bizarre thing, but when I get sick, I seem to lose completely the capacity for spiritual thought or exercise. It takes an extreme effort to focus on anything spiritual or divine. My head and my heart are nowhere near pursuing God, going to church, reading the Word, connecting with other people. All I want to do is shut down my life until my body recovers.

Why is that?

Desultory thoughts:

1. Our bodies were made in God's image. When God's creation fell to sin and imperfection, so did our bodies. You'll note that there's not supposed to be any sickness or death in the perfection of the coming eternity. (Revelation 21:4. On a side note, there's also no crying in heaven, just like there's no crying in baseball. What will girls do with their time?) I think that our bodies are meant to be a physical means of experiencing spiritual realities. That's not to say that when you're hungry, you're necessarily not being filled with the Spirit at that time, but it is to say that when you're hungry, you know what it's like not be filled and nourished. When your body is impassioned, you know what it is to yearn for communion with another person or being. These sensations you can translate to a spiritual plane pretty easily. Likewise, when you're sick, you know what it is to feel the opposite of alive -- a foreshadowing of death, the experience of being apart from God and eternal life.

2. In a certain sense, being sick doesn't make sense to me because if I'm in a bad place, shouldn't my first thought be a fervent plea for God to come and heal me, in the style of Jeremiah 17:14? The whole cycle of the Old Testament shows that when the Israelites got into trouble, their response was to repent and turn to the Lord and pray for healing and forgiveness, and then the Lord returned and made things right. Yet when I'm sick with the flu or somesuch, it takes considerable effort for me to even think of praying for healing or seeking the Lord, in favor of popping some Tylenol and going to sleep. Is there something wrong with me, or is there something counter-intuitive about this whole sickness process?

3. Which is easier to say to the paralytic? "Your sins are forgiven you," or "arise, take your bed and walk"? Physical healing can very well be a sign from God that He makes us well in all respects.

4. Maybe I'm grasping at straws, and there is no over-arching abstruse spiritual convention behind sickness, other than the fact that we have fallen bodies and it sucks to get sick.

But what a reminder of the dire mortality of our present existence. Do you know how much time I've spent at the gym in the past few months? We spend so much time on our bodies: working out, eating right, putting on suntan lotion, taking vitamins, bundling up in the winter, as if we were gods who could run forever on an infinite plane, and getting sick is a little slap-in-the-face from the reality of the temporary and transient nature of our present condition.

2 Corinthians 4:18: "Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day."