This morning my daughter climbed into bed with me. She wanted to cuddle and fall back asleep. Before she did though, she graced me with an all out sneeze, right in my face! LOVELY! Well now that I was awake… (not really I fell back asleep after wiping all the grossness off). I don’t know if you have ever seen a sneeze in slow motion. Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2QAGVMlns4 if you haven’t – it is pretty gross!
So after I got over my grossness, because 3 year olds don’t usually cover their mouth unless reminded every time, I was thinking what causes you to sneeze. It is usually something that gets into your nose that irritates it and your body wants to dispel it out. One definition actually reads “To expel air forcibly from the mouth and nose in an explosive, spasmodic involuntary action resulting chiefly from irritation of the nasal mucous membrane.”
Usually when I wake up, I start asking God what I should devotion with Him about, but today he put it RIGHT in my face, literally.
So- sneezing happens when there is an irritation of what is supposed to be in our body right? A sneeze shoots out air (and a ton of other junk) forcibly from the mouth and nose when something irritates it. Something that shouldn’t be there irritates the nose and the body just HAS to get it out of there. So if there is something coming into our lives that we aren’t supposed to have in there, like gossip, slander, drugs, alcohol, pre-marital sex… our Christian life should want to dispel it. If we have truly let the old go and the new come, 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone; the new is here!”, then when these things enter our lives we should be allergic to them. They should irritate the way they come into our lives.
If you think about it probably around 95% of the air that we breath comes in through our noses. Same way with our lives- 95% of the things that we bring into our lives, that we breath will be coming in our “nose” or our natural screening process. If something is wrong, we need to be sure to expel it from our life with great force- like and explosive action. A sneeze is involuntary, so we need to be sure that we have trained ourselves in God’s teachings so much that we recognize these bad things and can expel them from our lives. Read 1st Peter 2:1
Now, we always tell our kids to cover our mouths, and frankly after watching that short clip on-line, I really hope that you cover your mouth too. So if we are able to cover “our mouths” or make sure that we don’t go spreading germs and diseases when we expel these things from our actual bodies- shouldn’t we “cover our mouths” and ensure that we do not infect others or gross out others either? So we can share these struggles and issues with everyone, but not always with the entire world. This is a concept that is hard for me to grasp because I am an open book! Now a “sneeze” is not an involuntary reaction talking badly about someone or something – it is just getting the irritation out of our lives quick fast and in a hurry.
If you are allergic to something, you don’t like being around it. I have never had allergies before I moved here. Now that I do – during the first part of the spring, when the pollen is outside, I barricade myself inside, when I go outside, I avoid areas that have a lot of pollen so that I am not sneezing and having issues all the time. I am still able to get outside, go and live my life, but I avoid the things that irritate my body. If something is going to irritate our body and we don’t have the “medications” that will keep us from sneezing, we should avoid those areas.
Fortunately, God has given us medicine to ward off the irritations of life by following his word and the Bible and Jesus. Thinking what would (or did) Jesus do?
So in summation: We need to keep things our of our lives that are going to be irritating them. That is why the sneeze is all about. It helps to dispel the bad irritants. We need to cover our mouths when we sneeze and dispel these things – keep your issues and your struggles to yourself since non-Christians may look at you as judging. With that said - it is very good to have someone that understands to share this with. Just like you usually share a cold with your family! And we need to medicate ourselves so that our body can fight off the irritants better- we medicate ourselves by reading and studding the Bible and knowing how God reacted to things.
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