The Big Guy and his little friend
This is a tale of a big guy and his little parasite friend. The big guy went on a trip to Indonesia to work on the translation of a book he wrote last year. The little parasite friend, know to the stiff shirts in the Medical community as Entamoeba histolytica, better known to me as just Moe. Moe is a nasty little bugger, infecting up to 50 million people a year and killing 100,000 people a year, making Moe one of the top three parasitic causes of mortality worldwide. When Moe came to visit me, he was an unwelcome guest. I didn’t ask him to come, but come he did, making 5 days of my 9-day trip to Indonesia pretty crummy. At first, I didn’t know what was making me feel so crummy, but Moe was in there, doing his worst. I didn’t want to eat (which is crummy, because I love to eat foods from around the world), I had stomach pain, diarrhea, a fever with chills which really meant a full-blow case of the shivers, I was tired most of the time and I had difficulty focusing on the task at hand. Moe was doing his best to make sure that I didn’t do my part to finish the translation, and at time, while they worked away, I occasionally got under the sheets of my hotel bed and zonked out for an hour or so while they busily worked on in the same room. After three days of the little dance Moe and I were doing together, I was at dinner with my friends and began to feel not only an increase in the symptoms I was having, but I started to get lightheaded and dizzy, almost passing out. Of course, I decided then that it was time to see a Doctor in Bali, Indonesia and sure enough, Moe was found out and I got started on an antibiotic.
It wasn’t until after I went to the Doctor and began to feel a little better that my Indonesian Translator friends began to share with me that they started to get pretty worried about me. I think they were as happy I as was that I went to the Doctor. My biggest regret, of course, is all the potential conversations late into the night with my Indonesian friends, learning more about them, their families, and their hopes and dreams. I love this aspect of being with people from another culture! I’m also sad about all the potentially fun things we could have done together in and around Bali at night.
As I think about Moe and the timing of it all, I actually don’t think it was coincidental at all. Imagine thousands of Indonesian Christians better equipped to live a life fully devoted to Christ, understanding a little better their role in the Great Commission, and how desperately Jesus wants to use them to reach their country for Christ. We know that the enemy ‘comes only to steal and kill and destroy,’[1] and is always prowling ‘around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.’[2] The translated version of the book must be a threat because he brought his worst! It still is a little shocking that I contracted a parasite that is one of the top three parasitic causes of mortality worldwide!
And yet, the cause of Christ continued, we finished the next round of translation, and we’re on track to fulfill the thousands of requests from Church leaders for the resource, and I know that as I ‘resist him, firm in my faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world,’[3] and as ‘I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’[4] Nor will it stop the work of Christ nor my participation in it! Amen!
[1] John 10:10
[2] 1 Peter 5:8
[3] 1 Peter 5:9
[4] Romans 8:38-39