Week 42—Tuesday Psalm 32:1-4
Psalm 32:1-4
“IT’S THE SURLY BIRD WHO GETS THE GERM”
We mentioned yesterday that some doctors do not know how to deal with spiritual problems. Some do. A surgeon said to a public audience, “If you don’t come to God and surrender to God you will have to come to me and surrender to surgery. Seventy-five percent of surgical cases begin in functional disturbances and pass into structural disease. Then I get them.”
A doctor examining a patient said to himself, “Something is eating this man,” and found he had had an affair with another man’s wife. It was discovered the night before, hence the colitis. The man confessed it, asked forgiveness and got it, and is well.
But some doctors are problems to themselves. A friend of mine went to see a doctor who was having an affair with another woman and getting a divorce from his wife. She found the doctor walking the floor with a glass of whiskey in one hand and tranquilizers in the other. That picture of an able man, breaking himself upon the laws of God and trying to hold himself together with liquor and tranquilizers, is the essence of pathos and folly.
A prominent man and his wife led opposition to a pastor because he was treading on their toes. They drew up a bill of complaints to be presented to the church council. The wife broke out in hives as the day approached, and he lost his voice, couldn’t speak. “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed” (Luke 12:2)—sometimes in hives and lost voices!
A businessman in the Oslo Ashram had a nervous breakdown. Someone had been put in over him. He was resentful and bitter. He surrendered himself and his resentments to God and the next morning he said, “It’s all gone—I’m well.” And he was. Dr. Karl Menninger says, “Guilt changes the physical structure of the body and makes the person more susceptible to disease.” “It’s the surly bird who gets the germ.”
Dear Father, you have written your laws within us. Help us to obey those laws and thus obey the purpose for which we were made. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Health is my heritage—I shall take it and make it a gift and an achievement.