Foul and festering

Psalms 37 and 38. There's much to say about both psalms, but in the spirit of blogging, I'm sticking to one idea per posting. Yesterday I spent several hours in a hospital waiting room while my father had day surgery. He's not dealing with anything serious or life threatening, just a little adjustment of internal parts. But waiting in a hospital means encountering a huge range of humanity that streams through the front doors for various reasons. In the shadow of H1N1, there's a lot of emphasis on hand washing and visitors are encouraged to take a spritz of hand sanitizer at the front doors. Not everyone does, as I noticed after several hours in the waiting room. Interesting, that in our culture of advanced medical knowledge and understanding of germs, people won't wash their hands, even if they know it slows the spread of germs and viruses.
In the psalmist's time, illness was thought to be punishment from sin and others would wonder what the ill person had done to deserve such punishment (Holliday: 51). Psalm 38 is a lament on suffering and a plea for healing, perhaps from leprosy, as suggested in v. 5: "My wounds are foul and fester because of my foolishness." This illness causes the psalmist to have doubts and wonder if God has forsaken him/her . Yesterday's brief time in hospital reminded me of how vulnerable we are when we are ill and how dependent we are on other's kindness and help.
And although we don't claim to believe in a direct link between sin and illness, last week when my kids were sick with flu-like symptoms (perhaps the dreaded H1N1, but probably not), I did hear some folks wondering how they had gotten sick, and what they had done to be ill. Maybe what's pandemic in the current flu scare is blaming the victim for the illness.