Fevers and Faith

Have you heard these quotes from the Bible?

"How much more valuable you are than birds!" ~Luke 12:24

"If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, how much more will he clothe you?"  ~Luke 12:28

Meaning, of course, that if God cares so much for the birds of the air and the grass of the fields, He surely cares for us much more!  We were made in His likeness.  We are valuable to Him!

We tend to forget this.  We tend to turn to God in earnest only in the big things.  Good or bad, we turn to him when the big stuff of life happens.  We seek Him in our suffering over the loss of a loved one.  We praise Him when we get the new job that will allow us to finally pay our overdue bills.  We seek Him when our child is sick in a hospital bed.  We praise Him when a baby is born healthy and brings joy to the family.

But what about the small stuff?

I was reminded yesterday that God cares so much for us He even looks after our small stuff.

Awakened at 4am with stomach pain, I laid awake for two hours wondering when it would go away.  But at 6am, it worsened.  I felt like I was lying in a snow bank, naked, in Antarctica, in the middle of a snow storm.  I was that cold.  My body convulsed with bone-racking shivers.  I had a fever.  After a few minutes of shivering, my entire body began to ache, and my muscles cramped.  Every.  Single.  Muscle.  From my neck to my toes.  After 30 minutes, I gained the presence of mind to take some Tylenol.  After another 30 minutes, with no apparent effect from the Tylenol, and me in pain and tears, I cried out to God.

"God, make it stop.  Please,  make it stop."

And it stopped.  As soon as the words left my mouth, the bone-racking shivers left my body.  And I was able to relax my muscles.  Though the fever hadn't yet broke, and I still felt like an icicle, the pain and convulsing ended.

Of course, it would have ended eventually.  The Tylenol would have eventually kicked in, and the shivers slowly lessened.

But God cares about our small stuff.  He cared about my pain in that moment, and even knowing my pain would have gone away eventually, He cared enough for me to take it away when I asked.

You've heard the saying, "Don't sweat the small stuff."  It's not in the Bible, but it's no less true.

God's got this.