Saturday: Headaches through Resentments
WEEK 30
SATURDAY
HEADACHES THROUGH RESENTMENTS
Ephesians 4:31-32
We spend another day on the effect of mind and emotion on the body. Habakkuk says:
I hear, and my insides tremble.
My lips quiver at the sound.
Rottenness enters my bones.
I tremble while I stand. (Hab 3:16)
A woman working in an aircraft factory found that she was having headaches continually. She couldn’t find anything in home or personal life that could cause it, until one day she realized that she resented having men in greasy clothes take the tools that she passed out. When she faced her resentment and saw how unreasonable it was, her headaches disappeared.
A druggist said to me, “The husband’s sin can make the wife ill, and the wife’s sin can cause illness in the husband.” An Indian youth told me he carried a bottle of water around in his pocket to soak the cloths he had wrapped around his legs. They were always dry and numb. I found he had been accidentally shot while out hunting with a white man. This dryness and numbness developed after that. The accident occurred during the hot, dry season. The dryness made him think subconsciously of the accident, and numbness set in. When the connection was shown, the symptoms disappeared.
A very intelligent and cultured woman, wife of a doctor, made herself and everyone around her miserable by her fear of germs. She cleaned and scrubbed incessantly and was afraid of visitors, afraid they would bring germs into the house. But the biggest disease-breeding germ was right inside her: fear. Fear and resentments and self-centeredness are the seed plots in which diseases germinate and flourish. A pastor who was always ill said that whenever he went into the pulpit, he felt it sinking beneath him. He had been slipping through fear and conflict, and he created this outer symptom of sinking as a symbol of what was taking place within. It was what psychology calls “conversion,” a converting of an inner fact into a physical symptom.
O God, you are teaching us your way, sometimes by the hard way. When we won’t take your way, we find by hard experience that our own ways upset us. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I rest in the quietness and calm of God; therefore I am well in God.