Disease

How many times have you heard expectant couples say, "Well, as long as our baby is healthy"? John Knight from Desiring God ministries cautions, "'Healthy' exists on a spectrum of possibilities just like disability. And that spectrum is becoming narrower with every passing year." He points to an article about University of Washington scientists who were able to identify the DNA sequence of a fetus with 98 percent accuracy, and with safer techniques.

The article noted, "The accomplishment heralds an era in which parents might find it easier to know the complete DNA blueprint of a child months before it is born. That would allow thousands of genetic diseases to be detected prenatally." That means that more children with disabilities will be aborted.

But Knight also argues that many people will be tempted to order up "designer babies"—all fueled by "an increasingly idolatrous mindset that says I have the right and the responsibility to determine what is best for me — including the physical and/or developmental makeup of my children, or somebody else's children."

Anger is bad for your health in more ways than you think. Getting angry doesn’t just hurt our mental health, it’s also damaging to our hearts, brains, and gastrointestinal systems, according to doctors and research.

For instance, one study in the Journal of the American Heart Association looked at anger’s effects on the heart. It found that anger can raise the risk of heart attacks because it impairs the functioning of blood vessels.

Researchers examined the impact of three different emotions on the heart: anger, anxiety, and sadness. One participant group did a task that made them angry, another did a task that made them anxious, while a third did an exercise designed to induce sadness.

The scientists then tested the functioning of the blood vessels in each participant, using a blood pressure cuff to squeeze and release the blood flow in the arm. Those in the angry group had worse blood flow than those in the others; their blood vessels didn’t dilate as much.

The lead author of the study said, “We speculate over time if you’re getting these chronic insults to your arteries because you get angry a lot, that will leave you at risk for having heart disease.”

Pastor John Yates III once worked for the British scholar and Bible teacher John Stott. Yates reflected on the time when Stott’s aging and disability started to slow Stott down. Yates says:

Stott spent the last 15 years of his life going completely blind. It began with a small stroke that knocked out the peripheral vision in his left eye, forcing him to surrender his driver’s license. And over the years that followed, this man who wrote more books during his lifetime than most of us will read in an average decade became unable to see the pages in front of him. But that wasn't all. His body grew increasingly weak. He needed more sleep. He was eventually confined to his bedroom.

I spent three years working closely with John when he was in his early 70s. I was in my mid-20s. It was absolutely exhausting. I've never been around another person with a capacity for work as fast as his. He was the most disciplined and efficient man I've ever known. But there he was, years later, now in his 80s and into his early 90s, with his mind as sharp as ever. But then he was unable to do much of anything, except to sleep, eat, and listen out his bedroom window for the call of a familiar bird.

Now I found this personally incredibly difficult to understand. Why would God allow a man like John to suffer the loss of precisely those faculties that made his life so meaningful and has worked so successful, if it just seemed cruel? It would have been better, I thought, for him to die or to suffer from Alzheimer's, because at least then he wouldn't have known what he was missing.

But then I finally begin to understand why John never seemed to complain. That's because God was giving him the gift of absolute dependence. God was showing him that he delighted to offer Stott a dependence on him.

The dramatic increase in life expectancy confuses people. In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, the average life span was about 45 years. Now people are expected to live up to 78.5 years. That has spurred an unwarranted optimism, when in truth, the overwhelming majority of the increase is the result of a decrease in infant mortality.

At the turn of the twentieth century, about 10 to 15 percent of all children died before their first birthdays, mostly from infectious diseases. But because of medical advances, today less than one percent of children die before their first birthdays. Thus, Olshansky and Carnes point out in their book The Quest for Immortality, “The rise in the life expectancy has slowed to a crawl.”

Another thing that confuses people is thinking that if we could cure cancer, most of us would live many more years. Not true. In fact, Harvard demographer Nathan Keyfitz calculated that if researchers cured all forms of cancer, people would live only a measly 2.2 years longer before they died of something else! Unless science cures the majority of all diseases, as author Stephen Cave writes, “Then the result is not a utopia of strong-bodied demigods but a plethora of care homes and hospitals filled with the depressed, the diseased and the incontinent old.” In that case “it is not about living longer but dying slower.”

Writing for The Atlantic, David Merritt Johns says that a most confounding story appeared in his inbox by a tipster who prefaced it by saying, “I’m sorry, it cracks me up every time I think about this.”

Harvard doctoral research student Andres Korat found a curious result from a 2018 study: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. After consulting with his department chair, Korat set out to debunk his initial finding with more research, but it ended up being stubbornly consistent.

Korat wrote in his findings, “There are few plausible biological explanations for these results.” But he also mentioned several prior studies that found similar results. Mark Pereira is an epidemiologist who authored one of those prior studies. He said, “I still to this day don’t have an answer for it.”

In his deep dive into the story, Johns claims that several medical researchers ended up spinning their data into conclusions more readily acceptable to mainstream audiences. Instead of touting the health benefits of ice cream, they pivoted to yogurt. One research paper read: “Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. Whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not.”

“The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, who co-authored the paper. “Saying no foods were associated—ice cream was associated.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even with advances in medical knowledge and technology, the human body is complex and full of surprises. Only God understands it fully, and our best attempts are foolish compared to God's wisdom.

While working in India, Doctor Paul Brand, who pioneered the modern treatment of leprosy, once laid his hand on a patient's shoulder. Then, through a translator, Brand informed the man about the treatment that lay ahead. To his surprise, the man began to shake with muffled sobs.

Doctor Brand asked his translator, “Have I done something wrong?” The translator quizzed the patient and reported, “No, doctor. He says he is crying because you put your hand around his shoulder. Until you came here, no one had touched him for many years.”

Claire Wineland was born with cystic fibrosis and given about 10 years to live. Despite the illness, she was always optimistic and full of life. At the age of 13 her lungs collapsed, she was in a coma, and doctors gave her a 1% chance to live. After 16 days she came out of the coma and "the near-death experience” had radically transformed her understanding of what mattered most in life.

At the age of fourteen and knowing that she had limited time, Claire started a foundation called The Clarity Project to raise money for other terminally ill children with cystic fibrosis. She then spent the rest of her teenage years giving inspirational speeches filled with insights such as:

• “The quality of your life isn’t determined by whether you're healthy or sick or rich or poor. It’s determined by what you make out of your experience as a human being.”
• “The moment you realize it’s not about avoiding suffering, it’s about making something from your suffering, you’re incredibly free.”

When you listen to Claire deliver these insights, it’s hard to believe that she was just a teenager at the time she said them. Although Claire only lived to the age of 21, so many would say that her awareness of her mortality combined with the near-death experience accelerated her understanding of who she was and what she wanted to do in the world.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While many of us spend our entire lives without any sense of meaning, faced with her own mortality, Claire was able to live meaningfully with the knowledge that she might not have as much time as everyone else. As Christians, adversities and calamities can happen, but our meaning and mission come from Christ. Even when life is good, the calling remains.

Colin Powell, the great American military leader, was also a life-long fixer. According to an obituary in the New York Times:

Until his final days, Colin L. Powell remained preoccupied with fixing things. The former secretary of state and four-star general tinkered endlessly in his garage — sometimes with his welder and sometimes on a succession of [automobiles]. He was a regular at the neighborhood hardware store in McLean, Va., where he rummaged through parts for his house’s malfunctioning dishwasher or leaky faucets.

His plywood-and-wire fixes often left something to be desired aesthetically. But they satisfied his … compulsion to repair rather than discard what was broken. When he was fixing things, one longtime friend said, “there was a result at the end of the day. It’s why he was so happy as an Army officer: You take a platoon, and you make it better.”

But there were some things he couldn’t fix. In 2019, he was diagnosed with plasma-cell cancer. He died in October 2021. He also admitted that were a lot of things broken in this world that neither he nor the United States could fix. Once he told his assistant: “Going into the garage, I can see that the carburetor is the problem and fix it—unlike foreign policy, where nothing gets resolved. You’re just spending four years doing the best you can.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) Servanthood; Leadership—Use the first part of this illustration to show how servants or leaders take what they’re given and make it better. (2) Death or Brokenness—Use the full illustration to highlight how even someone as competent as Powell, a lifelong fixer, was powerless to fix death or to fix the world’s brokenness.

Before the discovery of insulin, diabetes was a death sentence. Here’s the life-saving story of how scientists discovered insulin. The American Diabetes Association reports:

In 1889, two German researchers, Oskar Minkowski and Joseph von Mering, found that when the pancreas gland was removed from dogs, the animals developed symptoms of diabetes and died soon afterward. This led to the idea that the pancreas was the site where “pancreatic substances” (insulin) were produced. In 1910, Sir Edward Sharpey-Shafer suggested only one chemical was missing from the pancreas in people with diabetes. He decided to call this chemical insulin.

So what happened next? In 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best figured out how to remove insulin from a dog’s pancreas. Skeptical colleagues said the stuff looked like “thick brown muck,” but little did they know this would lead to life and hope for millions of people with diabetes.

With this murky concoction, Banting and Best kept another dog with severe diabetes alive for 70 days. The dog died only when there was no more to extract. With this success, the researchers went a step further. A more refined and pure form of insulin was developed, this time from the pancreases of cattle.

In January 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy dying from diabetes in a Toronto hospital, became the first person to receive an injection of insulin. Within 24 hours, Leonard’s dangerously high blood glucose levels dropped to near-normal levels.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The discovery of insulin, brought life to those near death, giving hope to those at death’s door. We are all sick with sin but the discovery of the gospel and Christ Jesus brings life, and hope.

Soldiers in the Minnesota National Guard have had an exceptionally busy year. They helped process Afghan refugees fleeing to the United States and provided security at American military bases across the Horn of Africa. But none of those experiences prepared Minnesota’s National Guard members for their latest deployment. They are collecting bedpans, clipping toenails, and feeding residents at North Ridge Health and Rehab, a large nursing home in Minneapolis that is the largest in the state.

One soldier said, “I’ve had protesters throw apples and water bottles at me but that doesn’t compare to the challenge of giving someone a bed bath.”

30 Guard members have been working as certified nursing assistants at North Ridge, which has been so badly hobbled by an exodus of employees. Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz said, “Our health care work force is heartbroken and fatigued. Having the Guard provide a bit of a respite is a godsend.”

One of them is Staff Sgt. Nathan Madden, whose civilian job is an assistant manager at a home improvement store. He said the past two weeks had given him a newfound appreciation for those who care for the sick and the elderly. “This kind of work is humbling for sure. … It’s great to help out in the community, but I have older parents, so in a way this is preparing me for what I might have to do one day.”

Shiro Oguni opened a restaurant in Shizuoka, Japan in which all the waiting staff have dementia. In a YouTube video, the owner explains his vision, “Dementia is so widely misunderstood. People believe you can’t do anything for yourself and the condition will often mean complete isolation from society. We want to change society to become more caring and easy-going, so we can live together in harmony.”

The video then shows us the kitchen where Shiro and the chefs are cooking food. In a voiceover Shiro says, “We opened a limited period popup restaurant where all the waiting staff are dementia patients … and what did we call ourselves? The ‘Restaurant of Mistaken Orders.’”

The video then shows the wait staff lined up at the door of the restaurant bowing to the customers as they enter the restaurant. Then they take orders and begin bringing the orders to customers seated at the tables. One elderly server has a delicious plate of food which she offers to a guest, who smiling shakes her head that this is not what was ordered. The server says with a big smile, “It isn’t? Oops! Sorry dear.” Another waiter puts a drink in front of a customer only to take it back. “Oh, sorry, that wasn’t right. Oh no it was! I heard what you said, but I just can’t remember!” Another waiter needs help in totaling the bill and the customers kindly help them with the math.

There is an atmosphere of joy and smiles at every table as the wait staff needs help getting the plates of food to the correct person and words of gentle apology about the confusion.

Shiro says, “Our restaurant is stylish, and serves great food. If your order was mistaken, you can shrug it off with a smile and enjoy what comes your way anyway. The name, ‘The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders,’ allows our customers to enter with an open mind. They expected mistakes, so were OK with it. It created an air of easy-going acceptance. I’m convinced that if our message become more mainstream society will become more tolerant and open.”

The video ends with a summary:

37% of orders were mistaken

But 99% of customers said they were happy

You can watch the 2-minute video here.

Editor’s Note: According to the World Health Organization (3/22), there are currently 55 million dementia patients worldwide and this number is predicted to increase to 152 million by 2050.

A survey asked highly committed evangelicals what they thought of using gene editing to:

Treat disease at birth

An appropriate use of medical technology 52%

Taking medical technology too far 43%

Reduce disease over a lifetime

An appropriate use of medical technology 40%

Taking medical technology too far 58%

Make a baby more intelligent

An appropriate use of medical technology 5%

Taking medical technology too far 93%

Author Elizabeth L. Silver wrote the very personal memoir The Tincture of Time. It is about her then baby daughter’s stroke at six weeks and the trauma and uncertainty for a full year before she recovered.

Silver spoke to many people about the pandemic crisis and found their biggest concern was fear--not of illness, financial loss ,or death, but living with uncertainty. She also interviewed many people living with various diseases--living with medical uncertainty.

She learned that:

How we approach uncertainty in our health is a litmus test for how we approach life. Uncertainty is living outside of life and within it. It is the baseline of experience, of joy, of energy, of possibility, of fear. And uncertainty—especially in a pandemic—reflects how we as a society and we as individuals are.

Silver contrasts how most people deal with a medical crisis compared to doctors and nurses. Talking to non-medical people she “asked each person for the first word that came to mind when they hear the phrase ‘uncertainty in medicine.’ The overwhelming response was ‘fear’ or ‘blindness’ or ‘powerlessness.’”

Yet when she asked scientists and health care professionals the same question, their first response was “challenge” or “reality.” The difference was that they understood and expected this uncertainty; it is part of their professional worldview, and it is no different now. Health professionals and experts know that we don’t know much about this novel coronavirus. “The difficulty now lies in convincing the rest of us that uncertainty is something we can and must live with.”

Two of Jesus’ most famous teachings are “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Greater love has no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friends.” With these and numerous other biblical teachings, what should be the Christian’s essential attitude toward the challenging situations brought on by the coronavirus pandemic?

Here is a brief historical overview of Christian’s response to pandemics:

As all historians attest, Europe’s first hospitals were built by the early Christians “to provide care during times of plague, on the understanding that negligence that spread disease further was, in fact, murder.”

The Antonine Plague of the 2nd century may have killed off 25% of the Roman Empire. Christians cared for the victims and “offered a spiritual model whereby plagues were not the work of angry and capricious deities but the product of a broken Creation in revolt against a loving God.”

During another plague in the 4rd Century, the pagan Roman Emperor Julian complained about “the Galileans” taking care of people who did not agree with their beliefs. Church historian Pontianus wrote that Christians ensured that “good was done to all men, not merely to the household of faith.”

Religious demographer and sociologist Rodney Stark states that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that in cities with Christian communities, the death rates due to plagues may have been half that of other cities.

When the bubonic plague reached Wittenberg, Germany in 1527, Martin Luther did not flee the city like many did, but stayed to minister to his fellow citizens. His daughter Elizabeth soon died from the disease. In a tract entitled “Whether Christians Should Flee the Plague,” Luther wrote: “We die at our posts. Christian doctors cannot abandon their hospitals. Christian governors cannot flee their districts. Christian pastors cannot abandon their congregations. The plague does not dissolve our duties: It turns them to crosses, on which we must be prepared to die.”

Stressed out by the overwhelming events caused by the coronavirus in her city, New York City resident Gabrielle Bellot has a thirst for reassurance that everything will turn out all right. Bellot attempts to find comfort and encouragement apart from God.

She writes, that literature on pandemics, such as The Plague by Albert Camus, is never mainly about the disease:

Instead, it examines how humans deal with disease, how our inner lives shift as our outer worlds do. It affirms how precarious our place on this planet is. We move, unceasingly, in a dance with Lady Death. Her … perfume of necropolis grass and old flowers always near. If our life is always a dance macabre, the question is simply when she will take our hand in hers, blue and black nails against our skin, and bring us … into the sunless place beyond our life’s ballroom. Death, plague literature reminds us, is always, always with us.

We are living in a world “that seems to hang on the edge of apocalypse, climate or virus-related” tragedies. She doesn’t know what lies ahead, but “plagues, after all, will always return, whether or not we are ready. I still don’t know if I am. ... The literature of disease reveals the ghostly ballet we live in, ever so close to the grave. But it shows, too, those surprising moments of joy, love, and beauty we can find during disasters, even just briefly.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

In desperate times people search for assurance, peace, and security. In spite of the best man can do with medicine, philosophy, and technology, true peace of mind is only found in a genuine relationship with God.

There’s an old saying that says, “A parent’s job is never done.” Norma Brickey typifies that statement. Norma Brickey, 82, has been driving the streets of Columbus, Ohio, with a sign in her car window. It reads: “My son needs a kidney, O positive,” followed by her phone number.

Brickey knows the difficulties of finding a kidney firsthand: Both she and another of her sons have had kidney transplants. All three suffer from polycystic kidney disease. With more than 121,000 people on the kidney transplant waiting list, 3,000 being added every month, Norma is not content to sit around and wait.

Robin Young with NPR’s Here and Now asked Brickey how her efforts were going so far. Brickey replied:

I finally did get organized, and I still have a lot of callbacks to do. I’ve tried to reach them, but I don’t get answers all the time. But I keep trying. But I’ve had a lot of people that called. I have probably about 20 people that are testing, some of them have called me back, and they haven’t tested that out. I’m still searching. I’m still on my mission.

I can imagine what the history books say: There was a global pandemic caused by a virus. The number of infected people grew daily. Officials recommended frequent hand-washing and quarantining of the sick. Several cities went so far as to ban public worship services and other public gatherings! In the end, the pandemic killed 50 million people, including 675,000 Americans. No, we are not describing the COVID-19 pandemic of 2019-2020, but rather what is commonly known as the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.

Chris Gehrz, a history professor at Bethel University, recently wrote about how churches and church leaders responded to that 1918 pandemic, as reported by local newspapers.

-Some pastors were creative and lead outdoor services, encouraged home worship and even reading sermons published in newspapers.

-An interim pastor in San Francisco preached that many Christians had caused the pandemic as a result of being "cowardly" and "worldly" and only repentance of these sins would stop the spread of the virus.

-At the other spectrum, A Methodist leader wrote that "… the pandemic should convince “Intelligent Christians” to trust science rather than seeking to “tempt God to perform a miracle in the preservation of our health ..."

-Some pastors refused to close their doors, held services in protest, and in at least one city a pastor was arrested for refusing to cancel services.

-The Daily Telegram, of Worchester, Massachusetts, reported on how Christians were responding. Women from three local churches were taking care of “epidemic orphans.” They not only gave food and clothing, but “[supplied] them with plenty of healthful recreation and a little systematized instruction, too.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In this time of national crisis, we are reminded that this is not the first time that churches have faced a major disruption of regular activities. And just as history is judged in retrospect, how we respond to our current crisis not only gives witness to our faith, but also will be reported and evaluated by future generations. How do we want our response to be remembered?

James Bedford was a psychology professor at the University of California. Prior to his death from cancer, Bedford expressed his desire to be cryogenically frozen. His hope was that his body could be repaired and his consciousness revived with more advanced future technology. Bedford willed $100,000 for the preservation of his body.

However, when he died in 1967 everyone was caught off guard. The science of cryogenics was little more than a fringe idea and there was no cryonics industry equipped to preserve a body. To honor his wishes, Bedford’s nurse reportedly ran up and down the block collecting ice from home freezers of neighbors. She then called the Life Extension Society, founded to promote cryonic suspension of people, and Bedford became the first human to be cryogenically frozen.

After 50 years the cost of preserving his body has long exhausted the $100,000 Bedford had set aside. Frustrated by the high cost of storage, Bedford’s son moved his father’s body to a self-storage facility and periodically topped the container with liquid nitrogen himself. In 1982, Bedford’s body was entrusted to Alcor Life Extension Foundation, but how well his body was preserved is open to question.

With the prospect of reviving a frozen body so improbable that there are many within the scientific community who believe that selling even the hope is unethical. Even if a medical breakthrough is made, it is highly unlikely that Bedford, with his crude vitrification process, could ever be brought back to life.

But the hope that the future will change continues to drive customers to cryonics facilities. Over 300 bodies and brains are currently preserved in between them, with 3,000 more signed up to join them.

The need for quarantine today to contain the spread of the coronavirus has reminded historians of a certain small village named Eyam in 17th Century England. The Black Plague or Black Death ran in various forms from 1347 to 1665 and killed at least 25 million people in Europe and anywhere from 75 million to 200 million worldwide. The symptoms were “flu-like” after an incubation period of 3-7 days.

In September 1665, a tailor’s assistant brought a bunch of flea-infested blankets from London. Soon many of the estimated 800 residents of Eyam were perishing from the disease. Eyam’s rector, William Mompesson, along with the previous rector, decided to quarantine the village to contain the disease. Eyam lay on an important trade route between two prominent cities, and if the current plague was brought to those cities, many more would die. Together they persuaded the villagers to voluntarily self-quarantine.

According to eyewitness accounts:

A quarantine cordon was established with a one-mile radius marked by a ring of stones. For 14 months nobody went in or out of the village. Food was left at the boundary stone by nearby townspeople in exchange for gold coins submerged in vinegar, which villagers believed would disinfect them. The death-rate skyrocketed. ... One woman, Elizabeth Hancock, buried six of her children and her husband inside a month.

To limit infections within Eyam, church services were held outdoors and some villagers left their homes to live outdoors nearby. By the plague’s end, 260 of Eyam’s estimated 800 residents died, more than double the mortality rate of the plague in London. “The villagers’ self-sacrifice had worked. The plague never spread to nearby towns and, 14 months later, in November 1667, the quarantine was lifted.

An Eyam survivors’ descendant wrote in a history of the village that succeeding generations of Eyam villagers should admire their ancestors: “who in a sublime, unparalleled resolution gave up their lives — yea: doomed themselves to pestilential death to save the surrounding country.”

When the world almost came to a standstill during the spread of the coronavirus, an example of true sacrifice comes to us from the third century: A group of Christians emerged, who seem to have been inspired by the life and reputation of Epaphroditus. Malcolm Duncan in his book Risk Takers says:

They were known as “the Parabolani” (based on the Greek word for “risking his life” in Phil. 2:30). The movement began in Carthage in AD 252 and lasted several hundred years. It was a group of people willing to “risk everything” for the sake of the Gospel.

Here's the story: Like many other places around the same time, Carthage was petrified of the plague. It wrought death and disaster when it struck and it was merciless in its sweep, claiming the lives of all who stood in its path. So, when an outbreak of the plague struck the city in AD 232, the local authorities acted swiftly and decisively. Dead bodies were disposed of and those who were suspected of having been contaminated were put outside the city walls. The impact was enormous suffering and death and disease on an epic scale. The Bishop of Carthage at the time, Cyprian, also acted swiftly. He called the church together and invited them to go and live among the sick and dying. He challenged them to give up the comfort and security of their own well-being and to step into the world of the rejected and the forgotten, Cyprian set the example of Epaphroditus as an inspiration.

The Parabolani became a movement that served the broken, the poor, the forgotten and the vulnerable. Inspired by the example of Epaphroditus, they too gave up the security of what they knew and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime as they served those whom others rejected.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In every critical world situation, there is a challenge to service not fear. To selflessness instead of self-protection. From the example of Epaphroditus and ultimately Jesus Christ.