The Arrogance of Thankless Health

(Another Article I wrote for my Church's Newsletter)

Twenty-three years ago in Sparta, Tennessee, after only seven months in my mother’s womb, I was born. I weighed four pounds and ten ounces. Being two months premature, complications came with the earliness. I had highland membrane (underdeveloped lungs), and I had a brain hemorrhage. I stopped breathing shortly after I was born, and a nurse gave me mouth to mouth until an ambulance named Angel One got there from Vanderbilt. The doctor that delivered me didn’t believe that I would make it, and he didn’t want my mother to get her hopes up. I stayed in the hospital for 6 weeks until I finally came home. I barely weighed five pounds. During the course of the next year, I made three more extensive visits to the hospital, and one time my lung collapsed. Through all of this, the doctors and nurses called me a miracle baby. After that first year all of my health problems ceased.

I look around me all the time, and I see people who suffered the same things as I did, and they’ve been marked with handicaps. I often wonder why God spared me as He did, and why I’m not marked as them. There is so satisfying answer to this question. The bottom line is that God is sovereign and knows what He’s doing. As I look at these people who don’t have perfect health, I see the arrogance that laces my apathy towards my good health. When is the last time that I thanked God for my health? When is the last time you thanked God for yours?

Today I visited a lady who has a tumor which has left her as a shadow of her former self, but friend, Oh how she loves Jesus. Oh, God be merciful to me for my arrogance and thankless prayers for the health that you’ve given me. I wake up in the morning with eyes that see, I walk on working legs, I talk with clear/working speech, I eat without an I.V., I have kidneys which oppose dialysis, I have ears which need no hearing aid, I have lungs which breathe on their own, and I have a fully functioning brain. I HAVE GOOD HEALTH, AND YET I FIND MYSELF OFTEN PRAYING, RUNNING OUT OF THINGS TO BE THANKFUL FOR. MAY GOD FORGIVE MY PUTRID ARROGANCE OF THANKLESSNESS, FOR HE IS THE ONLY REASON I HAVE MY HEALTH (Acts 17:25). May endless praises forever fall from our lips for the King has given us so much. Let us not forget the Health-giver when we lay our heads on our pillows tonight. May I never forget. I love you church.

In Him,
Brother Jared