What Do You Say to Job?
Kathryn Lindskoog
January 1, 1997
There is nothing like severe nausea to increase our humility and remind us that we too are only human.
—Kathryn Lindskoog Most illnesses, especially the major ones, are blind accidents we have no idea how to prevent. I have had multiple sclerosis for more than twenty years. I was an extremely active young adult in love with life when the disease hit me. No bad habits brought it on. None of my friends or relatives got it. It just happened. It is an unpredictable disease that acts like polio in slow motion, weakening and paralyzing the whole body. The fatigue is indescribable. There is nothing to do for it but rest. Other major illnesses we don't know how to avoid include intractable heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, the majority of cancers, nephritis, stroke, schizophrenia, and several other things you wouldn't want to have. By now you have probably already thought of someone in your church with one of the above. Thank goodness, some of our old enemies are now vanquished. Tuberculosis was a major scourge that was fought in vain with a kind of early holistic medicine. George Orwell, author of 1984, was one of the last of a huge number of great authors who died young (in 1950) of TB. People thought the disease was caused by a combination of factors such as night air, lack of sunshine, poor food, and overwork. They treated it accordingly in sanitariums, and the patients usually died. But when we learned how to get rid of the tubercle bacillus, we conquered the disease. Whose Fault Is It?
I mention Orwell in order to show the problem with holistic assumptions about major illness, which are so popular today. Holistic medicine is a current fad. Perhaps it should be called hope-istic medicine. Lewis Thomas writes in his essay "On Magic ...
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