When I was in High School I only had two things on my mind: girls and basketball. And they were not necessarily in that order. As a sophomore I was at the top of my game and dating (I thought) the best looking girl in school. Then came one pass during a game, one catch, one time landing wrong on my left leg, and one time tearing the tendons in my knee into pieces. While in the hospital for my first knee surgery the great looking girl dumped me. In the space of a weekend I lost the two most important things in my life at the time. I spent the next few years angry with a God who would take them away from me. Why would a good God allow such bad things to happen to me?
In the 1300's a plague hit China and Europe call the Bubonic Plague, the Black Death, or Black Plague. In the space of five years 25 million people died in Europe due to this plague. Millions of friends and families who died cried out to a cruel God who could allow this to happen.
I looked at a piece of cloth covered with random stitches of various colored string. It had to be one of the worst pieces of cross-stitch I had ever seen and made the comment to my wife. She looked at me and then hit me as if saying, "you dummy!" She then turned it over and showed me the front side of the cloth where there was a beautifully done tapestry.
I often wonder where I would be if I had not blown out my knee when I was 16 years old. I often wonder if, at 44 years old, my priorities would still be the same as they were then or if God grabbed me by the lapels and shook me. Every time my knee gives me trouble I thank God for focusing me again on the right priorities. I only saw the backside of the tapestry at 16, now I see the front side.
The Bubonic Plague? Today's research tells us that many of the people who survived had a mutation involving the CCR5 protein that we all have in our DNA. Turns out that it is the same protein involved in the AIDS virus and makes many Europeans immune to AIDS. Hmm. Maybe a glimpse of the front?