The Viral Plague

Pharaoh quickly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, "I have sinned against the LORD your God and against you. Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the LORD your God to take this deadly plague away from me."

Moses then left Pharaoh and prayed to the LORD. And the LORD changed the wind to a very strong west wind, which caught up the locusts and carried them into the Red Sea. Not a locust was left anywhere in Egypt. But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he would not let the Israelites go. – Exodus 10: 16-20

The past two day’s readings in Exodus have been the story of Moses getting the people of Israel out of Egypt. After reading about the crazy plagues my first thought was this.

Those Egyptians were GANGSTA.

Pharaoh’s magicians matched the first three plagues tit for tat.

Drop your staff and have it turn into a snake. Easy.

Turn the Nile and other water into blood. That’s cool.

Make frogs rise up out of the Nile and go everywhere throughout the country… Yeah we got that handled too.

(God did earn style points for having Aaron’s staff gobble up the magicians’ staffs though.)

After these three, God upped the anti something vicious. Killer hail, boils, gnats, flies, locusts, darkness for three days. But still Pharaoh wouldn’t give up.

I had to admire his hustle.

Have you ever had a foe with this much determination?

I recently did: a computer virus.

Ok fine, it didn’t turn my shower water into blood or make bugs start popping up under my sheets but geez it nearly finished my computer, not to mention my ability to blog this weekend.

The sneak attack commenced Friday at around noon just before my physical therapy appointment and lasted through this morning. I had no idea what to do about it. So at the risk of further infection I went to Google and found a site called Geeks to Go.

The expert assigned to my case knew exactly what to do. It did take a couple of days but with his help my computer’s health was restored and I am able to get back to the creation of this illustrious blog.

Perhaps I’m being a bit silly here, but I think I felt a small bit of what Moses and Aaron felt in front of Pharaoh. That virus had a clutch on my computer like Pharaoh had on the people of Israel. And like Pharaoh, that virus’s heart was hardened beyond belief.

Given my relative position of defeat, I thought about surrendering… I pulled out my old Windows XP disk and tried to delete everything and reinstall a fresh copy.

I couldn’t even do that! Ultra wack.

It sucks to be faced with an adversary that has rendered you powerless. I was forced to seek outside help.

Sometimes we are in situations that are way too big for us to handle on our own. In these situations we have to be humble enough to know that we can’t handle it and ask for help. Help may come in the form of a fantastic miracle. But other times God works the miracles that we need through the people we have around us.

Whether it is Geeks to Go blessed with the technological prowess to kill a computer virus, or medical professional blessed with the know how to kill a physical virus within our bodies, we cannot forget to stay connected and stay humble.

After all, that’s what friends and family and our community are for. We are stronger together than we are on our own.

And when others call on us, we have the opportunity to be that same blessing in someone else’s life.

Today’s Reading: Exodus 9-11: Matthew 15:21-39