Verle Bell M.D.
[Originally published as Kindling Starts Fires]
Many of the illnesses that I work with are kindled. That means that they tend to gradually worsen. It becomes easier to fall into a relapse and harder to recover.
Change for the better or for the worse tends to be like that. I can become discouraged by how slowly I replace a bad habit with a healthy one.
Change for the worse sneaks up on me quietly.
Condition A: I start out hating evil but maybe being a bit fascinated by it.
Condition B: Then I may “taste just a bit of it” and recoil in disgust, then just as the frog in gradually heated water goes to sleep and lets himself be cooked, I play around the edges of sinful behavior, assuming that I can control it and enjoy the pleasure of sin for a season. Or maybe I think that I need to experience sin a bit in order to see what is so bad about it.
Condition C: Gradually, I find myself hooked and even wondering what is so bad about it.
Condition D: I may even get to where I call good /bad and bad/good, even attacking those who stand for health and truth.
My daughter is fighting for the truth of God-spoken creation. She gets her most vicious attacks from fellow Christians who say that the truth is driving off young people. The truth is that evolution is convincing most of our youth that there is no need for a God to explain the intricacies of creation, so they are free to indulge in being their own god. Or that God had to use quintillions of miserable deaths in order to produce the beauty we see.
Here’s what the process of changing for the better looks like as I allow God to gradually reprogram my mind.
- Condition A: I think that good is bad and bad is good and am puzzled by the poor outcome of my choices.
- Condition B: I am confronted with God’s truth and begin to wonder but still cling to my ways.
- Condition C: I accept that I need to change and decide to do so and then fall and give up.
- Condition D: I decide to reach out to God and others and go through the slow and painful process of change.
- Condition E: Then, once in a while, I catch myself and yield my body members according to a gradually growing awareness of what his ways look like when applied to real life.
- Condition F: After a while longer I find myself responding in his ways consistently, but must still concentrate to do it.
- Condition G: Eventually I respond in his way automatically and wonder how I could have ever considered our old way reasonable.
Lord make me to be driven by passion. Fill me with the fire of your love of all people and your hatred of all sin.
And this I pray that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment. Philippians 1:9
