- From Psalm 91
I am a Friday morning regular at a local downtown coffee shop, and have been going there since almost the day it opened, in 1997. My Dad missed very few mornings, during the 7:00am hour, between 1997 and 2017, the year of his death. The group of regulars, of which Dad was a member, still frequents the place, every morning. Some are snowbirds that disappear between October and April. But a few year-round locals keep the tradition alive.
In the late summer, in 2020, the coffee shop began to open back up after being closed since March, except for pick up orders and people that would sit outside. The world was still in the grip of fear - fear brought on by worries of a great viral outbreak to rival history's worst.
I refused to discuss the details of my health practices regarding the prevention of illness. I kept my own counsel and sustained the habits that had kept me healthy for decades. I had my own disease prevention regimen that had kept me going, through the good and bad, despite the panics attending every horrible "outbreak" that had been occurring, on almost an annual basis, every year of the new century.
I did some trial and error, and in my own experience, discovered that I caught the flu every year that I received the vaccination, but remained untouched by illness, during winters that I did not receive the flu vaccination. At first I tried it on a lark, by declining a shot one year. I spent half the year in fear that I would develop an extreme case of the flu. I didn't.
And so I made it into a multi-year experiment. And the hypothesis held: On years that I took the shot, I got sick. Medical reports and national news agencies may report one thing, in support of public health. But my own personal experience was telling me something different. Perhaps I was lucky, or not prone to illnesses. Or maybe the regimen discussed in the second paragraph prior to this, actually works.
But here's the main point: I have noticed that even Christians are afraid to boldly declare that they need no artificial help staying healthy, because God will take care of them. And while it is true that He does, it is also true that many people asserting this faith still get sick, some even to the point of death. God's will for our protection still operates in a very dangerous world where the only sure thing for the believer is that, if they lose a mortal battle in this life, they will win eternally by waking up on the other side, forever.
Just try to claim God's protection in today's modern woke culture. They can ruin you.
One of the coffee regulars tried to get me to answer a few questions that are really nobody's business but that were way too common between 2020 and early 2022. I will leave it to the reader's imagination to discern those questions. But my answer was always true, and sincere: "I haven't been sick since before March 13, 2020. Whatever I'm doing, it must be right." One of the regulars heard me say that once, tapped on the wooden bench and said "Knock on wood." It has been two more years and I can still say that.
Someday I will get sick. I actually kind of hope I do because sickness is a part of life. It's a part of human growth.
But when the Bible says God will protect you from the deadly pestilence, go ahead and believe it. And let the cynical words of others just roll off your back.
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