Fall Fever

Tonight our son had a fever of 103 degrees Fahrenheit after going to bed. He ate well today, although he was a little sluggish at the park this afternoon and had the chills after getting out of the bath tonight. However, we didn't expect him to hit that temperature. Fortunately, it seems to have gone down after prayer for him, as well as a Tylenol suppository.

The feelings that we went through as parents were a reminder of how fragile life and health are. In one e-mail, a friend working in Guinea had just gotten home to Iowa for the funeral of his father, who died from injuries in an auto accident recently suffered. I also got a message from another friend working in a hospital in Pakistan, which has just suffered a major earthquate where several thousand people are estimated dead.

In my readings on Celtic Christianity, I am struck by how they developed prayers for all sorts of events throughout the day. They didn't seem to separate the "sacred" or "spiritual" from the "secular" or "normal" parts of their day. Rather, they would seek to acknowledge God's presence in the midst of all the normal daily events. While I don't know if they had a particular formal prayer for a child with a fever, I expect that they would have invoked God's hand into the situation.

My tendency is to not want to bother God with my problems of life until they become too big for me to handle. While my wife will pray for God to help her find lost objects and parking places, I tend to think that this are things to miniscule to bother God about. For illnesses, my tendency is to want to take medicine, without necessarily praying for recovery. The extreme of this is a deism that sees God as being like an absentee watchmaker who created the world, but leaves it to itself now.

Fortunately, I'm starting to grasp, at least a little, about God's concern for the banal stuff of life. In addition to holding the universe together, He's also interested in our son's fever, misplaced keys, parking spots, etc.