Oh, the weakness of the flesh!

Friday, after a hard week of working, with plans for a long and hard day Saturday, returning well after dark, I ate supper and watched a movie with Stephanie. At about midnight I began a night, or morning, in the bathroom kneeling to the porcelain throne. I know not whether it was something that I ate or the beginning of a bout with the flu, but my body purged itself till about 7:30 in the morning. At the end of the purging process my epiglottis felt as though it had been scrubbed with a wire brush.

I was too weak to attempt climbing a tree and working with hard and dangerous work, so Saturday I spent half the day resting and then sharpening about ten saw chains and tending other small matters, including some desk work and phone calls.

Today I still felt weak and very tired, achy, and sore.

How frail and impotent we are we realize when a bunch of tiny virus or bacteria cells gang up to attack our bodies. Suddenly a grown man is reduced to a heap of writhing muscles on the floor. Such things leave a person unable to avoid the reality that sin has brought death to mankind and that we are entirely helpless to do anything whatsoever about it.

Thanks be to God that He has not left us to ourselves to fend for ourselves. Thanks be to God that He has not abandoned us to the demise that we have chosen for ourselves. Thanks be to God that such is not our everlasting plight, not for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Monday I will return to the job of removing boughs and felling the trunk and hauling the branches, logs, and debris of a tree that must be removed. I will do so with the remembrance that the man who throws logs can be brought to his knees by a microscopic organism, and that it is only by the grace of God that I have strength to recover and to start a new week of hard work. Moreover, it is only by the grace of God, proclaimed in His blessed Gospel, that I know Him as my loving Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, who in Christ does not hold my sinfulness against me, so that I know that such traumatic times are only calls to repentance, rather than evidence of what is to be an everlasting fate. God grant that His precious Gospel be proclaimed freely so that all people may know His grace, mercy, and peace in Christ Jesus the Lord, and live in that comfort both now and forevermore.