Help For What Ails You

When doctors candidly talk about the types of ailments and symptoms they see on a regular basis, they note the chronic nature of many illnesses and the disturbing number of preventable disease events that they confront. At the same time, there is the stark reality that when patients present themselves demanding help for their suffering, they want something to change the immediate circumstances.
Far too often, physicians are forced to enter into a kind of further debilitating co-dependent role as they treat symptoms at the expense of sustaining the behaviors and actions that prompted the “disease” in the first place.
It is a frequently accepted social pattern to serve and drink alcoholic beverages.
To do so is done with frequent attentiveness to the variety of colorful and sophisticated nuances of taste and selections offered by a seemingly endless variety of delightfully displayed and well-articulated options by which one can “enjoy” the effects of such intoxicants. But there is a reality to be faced. Alcohol is toxic to the body. It can serve as a disinfectant. At its best it serves in primitive fashion as a painkiller and may appropriately be given to the dying for such purposes. At the same time, to portray the results of alcoholism on the stage of life is to see disease, dysfunction, despair, disability, and endless episodes of vomiting, disorientation, boisterous and destructive behaviors, a pattern of social and societal disengagement created by a foreign substance entering the human body and attacking it with a vengeance.
Many today utilize this socially accepted and readily available toxin to treat their “dis-ease.” Many very real and treatable physical conditions are often “self-medicated” by individuals who go to the nearest source of cheap “pain relief.” Others have come to a pattern of self-destruction by the yearning for acceptance that drove them to act and adopt patterns that were assumed to be socially enhancing to their lives. All the while…not recognizing the socially debilitating effects of their actions, and equally physically debilitating results.
Perhaps it isn’t until you have attended the funeral of a teenager who died of alcohol poisoning that such a message stands out in contrast to the 75 year old closet alcoholic whose wife bears the scars and emotional devastation of years behind closed doors of pain.
We have our ailments. We have our pain. We have our suffering. But the tragedy of our time is that we multiply our agonies by our actions and decisions that rather than helping, only create further problems. There is wisdom, born from above, that God extends to us through His Son Jesus Christ. It is the comprehension of a new life and a new way of living. It is a gift to be received in faith…it is recognition of our need to turn to God for our help and salvation. It is an understanding that what ails us most is a broken relationship with our creator and giver of life.
When that relationship is set right…the ailments and pains and diseases become matters with which we can deal redemptively, in ways that direct us to the healing and life sustaining provisions of God. I thank God for the wonderful gifts of physicians and surgeons and nurses and pharmacists and therapists of all kinds who work daily to alleviate the pains and suffering of those who are sick. What I also rejoice to see are those gifts of God’s giving that are used daily to promote healing and health through actions and choices that preempt needless suffering in the first place.