Something bad happened, Mom. You don’t want to know.
So ended our easy Saturday morning.
I do want to know, Gabe, I assured, kneeling before him.
Then my seven year-old showed me two of the most obscene gestures I’d ever seen. The sun went dark.
But ever the prisoner of hope, I thought: Maybe they’re only meaningless motions to him. Innocent-like when he’d use his third digit to point.
Alas: This one means a boy is…And that other one is what a girl does…
Test positive. Gabe was infected.
Exposure
The boy who watches G was exposed to X, or R at least. The son with the sensitive eyes- the son who won’t watch Wallace and Gromit for “weirdness,” and who covers his ears to block the voice of a Talking White Rabbit-this son saw that. He heard that.
My heart crashed into my gut. Then, in the hush I asked,
Gabe, where did you learn that? Who showed you that?
Wide blue eyes to mine. Earnest, sober voice to me:
It was Evan, Mom, on the bus. I shouldn’t be his friend anymore. And a big boy-he showed Evan. He told me what it meant. But I don’t know his name. He doesn’t go to my school.
That’s how Gabe got infected and his tender mind was tainted. It’s how his innocence was lost.
Bad Infection
Actually, Gabe’s innocence wasn’t lost by the vile words and vulgar gestures of a big boy on the bus. It actually happened way before that.
Because neither Gabe, nor any of us, has ever been truly been innocent. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, Israel’s sweet, sin-stained, Psalmist wrote. Babies aren’t blank slates and children aren’t cherubs.
Apostle Paul knew and in our heart of hearts, we it too: we’re all infected with sin’s dread disease. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned (Romans 5:12).
We’re all carriers and one day we’ll all die of it. Sin is a bad infection.
But there is another kind.
Good Infection
In Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 4) C.S. Lewis wrote about infections. Not all infections, he asserts, are bad.
Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them…
Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ…We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has–by what I call ‘good infection’. Every Christian infected is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
This is the good infection- that we may share the life of Christ. That we may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death (Philippians 3:10).
And we ‘little Christs’ can spread this good infection, this loving life of Christ, to those infected with the bad.
Prayers For Carriers
That exposure came 5 years ago. A couple years later there was that online scare with the 12 year-old. And just this morning there were texts too ugly to show my husband. Contamination, exposure, infection. So we pray.
We pray that, though both sons were exposed and, like their parents carry the bad infection, God will keep keep them largely symptom-free. We pray they won’t infect others with this brand of the sin disease, and that they’ll be able to be sensitive to the Spirit and to resolve each day not to set of before their eyes any worthless thing (Psalm 101:3); that they will be wise to what is good and innocent to evil (Romans 16:19-20). We pray that this disease won’t keep spreading, that it’ll stay in remission.
And today when I jogged by Evan’s house I prayed for him too. For Evan and the big boy on the bus who infected him all those years ago. I prayed that they will know Jesus so that they too can be healed.
Lord, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who infect us with theirs. Please use us to spread your “good infection,” too. Help us to live in love like you. Amen.
For in Adam all die, so also in Christ will all be made alive.
1 Corinthians 15:22
Interesting analogy and an uplifting message during these times of inconvenience and the inconsistency of the messages regarding the details of the effects/results of the contamination.
Thank you, Bob. I keep thinking, and saying to some, the greatest evil isn’t the disease or even dying of the disease (easy for me to say I know), but of dying without knowing Christ Jesus. We need “the good infection.”