We had a problem in our house last year. It first showed up in December soon after my eldest daughter got home from working in an orphanage in India. She confessed as soon as we got her into the safety of the family van that she had brought something besides gifts home with her. We thought it might be embarrassing if other people knew about it, so we decided to keep it under our hats, so to speak.
The very next day we visited our sad-faced parmacist, a mild-mannered Chinese man who shook his head dolefully and murmured, "very common in the tropics," - which is what he says about everything, and gave us a small bottle of foul-smelling liquid which was supposed to be all we needed. And for a while we forgot about the problem. Until one day we realized with horror that it had spread and was now affecting other members of our household as well.
We tried everything we could think of ; we read advice columns on the internet, researched the topic, tried this remedy and that - though we never spoke with anyone personally about it.
We spent lots of money and lots of time trying to solve this problem, but we never told anyone outside the family. It was just too embarrassing. Nothing like this had ever happened in our household before, and while we heard it was fairly common among the population, we still did not want to seem like the kind of people who needed help dealing with this issue.
Although at first the problem was fairly small and seemed manageable, over time it grew, till sometimes it distracted us from everything else. Somedays I spent hours dealing with it; some days we had to rearrange our schedules because the next treatment was due and if we postponed it a day we might be back to day one. Through it all, however, we went to great lengths to keep it a secret, which was not always easy to do since some of our behaviors must have aroused suspicion.
During the months we were dealing with it we went to church camp, participated in a missions trip, had friends stay with us for lengthy visits, and generally carried on our lives, but we did our best to make sure no one ever knew what we were dealing with. We kept it strictly under wraps. Outwardly we looked, we hoped, like nothing was wrong. We didn't want people to start avoiding us or examining us a little too closely. And we knew they would.
Keeping secrets can wear on you, however. At one point my 10 year old asked plaintively, "Can we talk about this when it's over?" "Sure, honey," I replied. "We can laugh about it when it's not a problem any more. It may even be a good story to tell. But not yet."
So, I guess I can talk about it now, though I still can't quite bring myself to use the "L" word, if you know what I mean. Because I do care what you think about me. And I do have the tiniest worry in the back of my mind that it could happen again. That I'm not invulnerable. Or perfect. And I do still live in the tropics.
So instead of talking about my problems I'd rather talk about something uplifting, like what I read in the Bible this morning. Like James 5:16 that says, "Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other that you may be healed."
You go first.
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