It’s hard not to be apprehensive about stepping out the door these days, much less setting foot on a plane. What with Ebola, the off-chance your plane might get shot out of the sky, or some nutjob decides to blow up the park you pass through every day.
Once the seed of fear has been planted in your mind, your soul. It’s hard to uproot. It’s hard to find the peace.
To calm these voices, the doubt, the fear, I pray Psalm 91. It’s a reiteration, quite a specific one, of how Jesus’ protection is on you. A hand that shields you all the days of your life. I say the Psalm and I’m reminded that I only need say the Word and I shall be healed. That I only need say the Word, and I have His protection morning, noon and night.
I came across this article talking about how Ebola spread on my newsfeed the other day, and this paragraph jumped out at me:
“Ebola patients trickled into the hospital one at a time initially, but soon the flow picked up. One of the new patients was himself a doctor, Melvin Korkor, who had contracted the virus along with five nurses and four other workers at his hospital many hours away by car in the rural county of Bong. He had been told that he had a 10 per cent chance of surviving.
Korkor thinks he caught the virus from one of his nurses when he touched her with his bare hand to check for fever. Before he left for treatment in Monrovia, he told his wife, “The only thing I want you to bring for me is a Bible.”
At ELWA, Korkor read his Bible – particularly Psalm 91 (“Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence”) – and drank 12 litres of rehydration fluid every day. He held his nose when he ate so that he wouldn’t throw up.
Four days later he felt a little better, and realised he would live.
All nine of his colleagues died.”
I’m probably not going to go charging into an Ebola ward armed with a prayer, but to quell my anxieties and my worries, to help me do what I need to do when I’m afraid, to help me be sure when I am unsure, it does get the job done.
Regina de Leon 