Approximately 20 days after leaving the United States and landing in Cote d’Ivoire, Africa, I found myself at a clinic in the nearest city, Daloa. After having symptoms for several days, my team decided to strongly encourage me to go get checked out. One blood draw and 30 minutes later the doctor called me into the “pharmacie” room and said lots of words in french. One of the few words I understood was “malaria”.
Dang.
Let me give you a little backstory. Choosing whether or not to take malaria pills was a really back and forth discussion in my head. Some people who have done this trip before said they took the pills, some didn’t, some said they took them and still got malaria, some said they never took them and never got malaria. Some of the side effects didn’t exactly make the preventative appealing, so I decided to bring them with me, but not take them unless we were in an area with a lot of mosquitos.
Flash forward to arriving in Zepreguhe, the tiny village that has been my home for the past month. My first couple of days here, I was a walking bottle of bug spray. I DARED a bug to try to land on me and survive the DEET concentrate that was probably melting my skin off. After several days, I noticed that there weren’t many mosquitos, and my layer of bug spray kept what few there were seemingly at bay. I slowed my use of bug spray, and I never saw a bug bite on my body. I was feeling good about my relationship with the insects- they seemed to keep a respectful distance.
But APPARENTLY, some punk mosquito DID in fact bite me with its nasty little infected sucker and viola, malaria was introduced into my precious blood.
*insert a few hours of self pity and days of sleeping and cracker eating*
See what’s funny is I think we’re all a little more prone to malaria than we think.
How many times have I been bit up by terrible things that are said to me, or about me, or by me to myself? I think about the times I’ve walked through life with my bottle of bug spray, getting that layer of protection on thick so those words don’t have the chance to get under my skin. But despite our best efforts, keeping every bug in the world away with a bottle of bug spray just isn’t likely. There’s always going to be that one punk mosquito that finds its way to your skin and pokes into the blood.
You might be left with an irritating itch. You might scratch it so hard it bleeds before it eventually goes away.
Or, you might just get malaria.
Words have the power of life and death (Prov. 18.21). If words spoken out of bitterness, hatred, jealousy, anger, or even fear bite us under the skin, we can become infected with feelings of resentment, rage, cowardice, self doubt, and worthlessness. God, in His great love for us, will heal those wounds in our lives, but the healing process can be painful- the pills can be hard to swallow, and the sickness still wrecks havoc on the body (you might just poop your pants. hypothetically of course). Because He doesn’t want to see us suffer with any symptoms at all, He wants us to take our malaria pills. When we fill ourselves up with the truth of what God says about us, and even more, when we actually dare to *believe* the things He says about us, it builds up our immunity to the awful, infectious words that make it under our skin.
Nothing stops a lie greater than knowing absolute truth.
Nothing stops resentment more than being filled with love// Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another [John 13.34]
Nothing stops rage more than being filled with peace// Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through Jesus [Rom. 5.1]
Nothing stops cowardice more than knowing your power// The spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you [Rom. 8.11]
Nothing stops self doubt and worthlessness more than knowing you are loved beyond measure// God demonstrates his own love for us in this- while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us [Rom. 5.8]
Ease up on the bug spray, and don’t let some punk mosquito bite infect your whole body.
Take your malaria pills.
And after it all, if you still get infected, the clinic is just a prayer (or bumpy taxi ride) away and the doctor is always in (is that too cheesy? I don’t care. Also I would kill for some cheese right now, but I digress)
