Time just "flu" by

Winter virus still life :)

We were steam-rollin’ right into another Christmas season when IT happened.  I had the gift bags ready, most of the holiday correspondence caught up, and a turkey ready to thaw for a dinner with our son and family.  Oh, don’t forget the ingredients for the “green bean casserole” with its fried onion toppings. I’d helped my daughter-in-law take the two older boys (3 and 4) to get their hair cut at a local walk-in shop. They would look sharp for Christmas pictures. Baby brother, still newborn bald, would look great, too, as long as we chucked his cheek for a smile just before the shutter snapped.

Then IT happened.  The Friday before Christmas, I told my husband, “I’m getting a sore throat. It hurts to swallow.”  He confessed to similar symptoms. Within hours we were unhappily hosting the respiratory flu that was swash-buckling its way through the valley.  The news had reported that there was a bad flu  whose genetic footprint didn’t get into the vaccine we had so dutifully gotten earlier in the fall.  And so Christmas passed, and then New Year’s, in the fogginess of fevers and congestion that had to take their course.  We handed off the gift bags to our son through a barely-open door, and sang a new version of “It came upon a midnight clear” when we kept the midnight lights burning with fever and coughs.

I shouldn’t complain.  We had food in the house (though little appetite).  A warm house (despite snow and ice outside).  Medicines to treat symptoms (the virus had to run its two-week course). If I had to be sick, I’d rather it be now, and not 400 years ago.What? Four hundred years ago?  Where did that remark come from? Well, some of my favorite leisure reading (or sick-time reading)is compilations of hymn stories, and I'd learned about the 1644 hymn “Now Thank We All Our God.”  I’d never given it much thought other than to connect it with the American “Thanksgiving.”  It works for that time of year, but its German origin was actually thousands of miles away from the early settlement of America.

At that time, Germany was in the crucible of the terrible Thirty Years War. One of the walled cities to which refugees fled was Eilenberg, whose only pastor was Martin Rinkart. Enemies would still break through to kill and destroy, but the greatest enemy within was hunger and plague.  In 1637 alone, Rinkart conducted funerals for 5,000 residents, including his wife.  Much sorrow and spiritual wrestling forged his hymn with its stalwart words of hope, like these lines:

Oh may this bounteous God /May all our life be near us,

With ever joyful hearts/And blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace/And guide us when perplexed.
And free us from all ills/In this world and the next.

It should be no surprise that this hymn became the second most widely sung hymn in Germany, next to Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress.”

Our Christmas flu? A droplet of misery and inconvenience in the perspective of eternity.