The little story summaries from my church I have been meaning to type:
3 quite amazing testimonies I heard, 2 at beginning of the service, the other during the cup-of-tea timeslot between Sunday school and main service.
1. A teenage boy got up and told us that another teenage boy who nearly died last year really shook him up. He was convinced that that teenager would go to heaven, but he knew he himself was not a true believer. As a result of self-examination and studying the Gospel message properly he became born-again.
2. The other teenager's mother got up.
Background story: he had fallen off his bike, split his head open so deeply the brain was showing and deeply unconscious (can't remember if CPR had been required). After being stabilised he was flown via ambulance helicopter to Brisbane (our state capital), needed brain surgery to release brain pressure and skull reconstruction, and then a fair bit of medical treatment for weeks. Except for a scar on his forehead, no-one would know anything had happened to him last year.
The mother said several things had been happening leading up to that incident, her father died and other stressful circumstances. She could not understand at the time but said she now felt she was being prepared for this major incident, and that hearing the young man may have been saved because of what had happened made it all worth while.
The third one, to anyone else but me it would have just been a happy medical story.
I had never talked to this elderly man before. He had been away for several weeks to have hip surgery done.
In short conversation I said that I hoped it had been successful.
He then started telling me that God had been very good to him; all he had needed in his life was two hip surgeries (other done years earlier), he had been a hard worker all his life.
Suddenly "they did scans of my lungs and there was a black shadow - they said I must have had tuberculosis but God must have healed me".
Inwardly my jaw dropped. I merely said that that was wonderful.
In the past few weeks I have watched half of a semi-autobiography movie about a young man diagnosed with TB in the back, and through the movie it showed how moral standards were loosened, and some changes in character occurred in him and fellow patients due to them embracing the "sick role".
I am nearly through the very difficult novel
The Magic Mountain again, which is set in pre- World War One days. It is also about a young man who was diagnosed with (thought to be) TB, who embraced the sick role and his character changed a great deal, lowered morals and avoiding adult responsibilities via taking advantage of the sick role.
I never hear of tuberculosis cases in Australia, but I heard that man's short story while I was thinking about the topic. What it means to me personally is a big issue I am untangling presently. I am trying to remove last traces of "sick role" thinking.
There is a time and a place for debate - it isn't here.