I’m a little under the weather today. Nothing I can quite put my finger on except my pulse, which is normal. Not wheezing or sneezing. Not really febrile, nothing a couple of aspirin can’t knock down. A little achy and low energy, just plain blah.
This happens to me sometimes. I just go into armadillo mode until it passes, which is usually quick.
My mom didn’t tolerate a lot of complaining about minor illnesses, especially vague attacks like these. She just pushed through. I’ve told you before that her favorite way to fight off the flu was to scrub the kitchen floor (she thought flu shots were for weaklings and only got one late in life when the nursing home forced her to, complaining all the while that she had never been sick a day in her life). She could have the worst head cold in history and she would still look you in the eye and say, “I doo nut hafe a culd,” then sneeze all over the place.
Her standard response to my complaints was to remind me of how Christ suffered on the cross and how insignificant our own minor pains were by comparison. Not to sound sacrilegious, but I never really bought into that, even when I heard it in church. I mean, I wasn’t complaining about being nailed to a cross. I just felt lousy.
Christ’s redemptive suffering was a cosmic event, a sacrifice on an unimaginable scale. What I do like to imagine, however, is that there were days when Jesus, the man, probably didn’t feel so hot. He must have caught colds and flus, just like everyone else.
He probably had bunions and an achy back from all that walking and preaching. Thirty-three was a pretty ripe age back then. Maybe he could have used a good pair of glasses. Surely he had days when he felt just… blah, and there is no record of him healing his own aches and pains. He endured them because he was on earth as both man and savior and his sacrifice would have been meaningless if he hadn’t been fully human, experiencing all our various woes, our joys and our sorrows, our aches and pains. Christ knew what it was like to be us.
Christ knows just how I feel today… lousy. And you know something? That makes me feel better.
