Homeward or wayward

I can feel myself getting sick. You know the feeling. Suddenly you realize how tired you are, and your throat feels like there may be sandpaper in there, and the roof of your mouth begins to sting.

I have friends who react by bundling up in sweatshirts and hats, burying themselves in blankets, and sweating it out. I admire their ferocity in the face of illness, their desire to face and destroy it.

I am, on the other hand, a big sissy. I imagine, first of all, that this is the end, that I have swine flu or anthrax or throat and roof-of-the-mouth cancer. I monitor every symptom, and bemoan them, and wonder if this will be like the last time I was really, really sick, whenever that was. I cash in the misery before it even arrives on my doorstep.

As I contemplate the illness overtaking my body, I am inclined to ponder the sickness in my soul. Sickness is not the natural state of things. Not in our bodies and not in our souls. We were not crafted to be sick.

Yet we are all sick. And we are all heading deeper into, or further away from, this sickness all the time. There is no soul's plateau. At least this is my experience. I am either growing sicker in my heart, or I am being healed.

So why am I not more like my friends, who recognize their sickness, bundle up their weakening bodies, and let themselves be healed? Why instead am I like a flu-ridden man who runs into the darkening cold, as if he can outrun the illness beneath his flesh?

When the prodigal son came to the end of his wealth, and the end of his revelry, and the end of himself, he came home to his father. He recognized his condition, and he came home. His brother was wayward too, in heart, in spirit. Did this brother also come back to his heart's true home, repentant, humbled? The Bible doesn't say. We are left to speculate on the ending to the brother's story, and perhaps think on our own stories, unfinished as they are.

We are always walking, after all, toward life or toward death. Homeward or wayward. Which way am I going? Which way are you going?