At our house, we call it clean juice. I think the official name is "hand sanitizer." Whatever it's called, I'm using it big-time. Flu germs!
Our local hospital is overwhelmed. The next closest hospital is overwhelmed, too. By people from our town.
And this especially nasty flu invasion is all over the country. In one major city, some hospitals have issued "bypass" warnings - bypass bringing any patients here unless it's life-or-death. In another area, the hospital set up triage tents in the parking lot because their ER is so overrun with flu victims.
Did I mention this flu is especially nasty? If you get it, it hangs on. If someone in your family gets it, you may be next. Of course, that's the case with colds and lots of other contagious grungy. Families are for sharing - including germs.
And not just flu germs. There are family germs that actually get passed from generation to generation. Moral viruses, character infections that somehow get transmitted from parent to child.
Sadly, the things that drove us crazy about our mom or dad - that may have hurt us deeply - start popping up in us. Even though we said, "I'll never be like that!" But we are. And the sad part about family germs is that the infection that scars one generation passes down and scars another one.
A teenage guy complained to me one time about how he could do nine things right and one thing wrong - only to have his mother just talk about the one she could criticize. I asked him how his grandmother treated his mom. With a dawning in his eyes, he said, "Like my mother treats me." He thought for a moment and said, "Oh man. I think I'm starting to be the same way."
And so it goes. Control freaks beget control freaks. Negative reproduces negative...an angry parent, then an angry child - who becomes an angry parent. Addictive behaviors...self-centeredness...a weakness for the opposite sex...self-pity...a wounding tongue - we hate it, but we do it.
That's not new. Even one of the writers of the Bible said: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" (Romans 7:15). Who doesn't know that feeling?
So much of the darkness is those family germs. Actually, family sins. They're some of the toughest sins for us to see - and even tougher to change. In fact, if we could have changed, we would have changed by now.
That conflicted Bible writer concluded that there was only one hope of a cure: "Who will rescue me?" He couldn't save himself from himself. He knew it would take a rescuer. And he found Him. "Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24).
So many of us trapped in the chains of our dark side have found a powerful game-changer from the Bible. "You were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers." The chain of sin and hurt can be broken! By supernatural intervention. "You were redeemed...with the precious blood of Christ" (1 Peter 1:18-19).
The moral diseases handed down through generations can be cured. But only one way - a blood cure. But not our blood. Jesus' blood. Freely given when He died on the cross to pay for every sin of our life - and to rob it of its power to poison our lives any longer. Or the lives of those we love.
Talk about hope. When you've got Jesus, you can face that infectious darkness and say, "It stops here!" And replace a legacy of hurt with hope.