Noah and the Bugs-- Seasonal Suffering

Many people are aware of bacteria and viruses, but not exactly what they are.  Bacteria are small, single-celled organisms that can live in all different environments, including humans.  We all have bacteria on our skin and in our mouth and nose and in our intestinal tract.  The bacteria in our gut are very helpful, helping us to digest our food.  Other bacteria cause infections and other serious problems.  Bacteria can be grown in a culture, usually by depositing them onto a culture medium like agar in a culture plate which is then kept in a warm environment.  The agar is like gelatin, providing nutrition for the bacteria.

Viruses, on the other hand, are not cells.  They barely qualify as one of God's creatures, but are more like one of God's things.  They are a collection of genes inside a structure that invades human cells.  Unlike bacteria, they do not survive outside of a host organism for very long.  Whereas bacteria are perfectly capable of reproducing anywhere they live, viruses can only reproduce inside a cell.  They invade the cell and hijack the cell's own DNA, forcing the cell to make more copies of the virus.  After enough virus has been made, the virus particles rupture the cell, spreading on to the next cell and throughout the body.

This Thanksgiving I have been suffering from a particularly vicious cold, caused by one of the common cold viruses.  The common cold is caused by a huge number of different viruses, usually a rhinovirus or a coronavirus. Once you have been infected with a specific cold virus, you will develop immunity to that virus and not get infected with it again, just like you only get the measles or mumps one time.  The problem is that there are at least two hundred different cold viruses, and they keep mutating into different versions, so it is impossible to develop immunity to all of them.  This is the same reason that an effective vaccine to the common cold cannot be developed.  Although antibiotics work well with most bacterial infections, they do not work at all on viral infections.  Basically, then, the only weapon we have once we get a cold is prayer.  Each time I get a cold and I have prayed for healing, God has always answered my prayer-- seven to ten days later.

So colds are part of the suffering that God has in his plans for us.  I try to imagine the difficulties Noah had in preserving all these bugs that afflict us.  For the bacteria, I imagine he would only need to get all the different bacteria, load them onto culture plates with agar, and place them into his wood fired incubator.  The viruses, on the other hand, would have to be carried by humans.  So I guess that Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth and their four wives would have each carried around twenty-five cold viruses to survive the flood.  I am surmising that God, in His mercy, would have somehow protected them from all the symptoms of having twenty-five colds at one time or that would have been one miserable ride on the ark. 

I really don't know why God allows suffering or why he allowed us to get colds.  It goes back to original sin, the fall, when Adam and Eve disobeyed Him and brought sin into the world.  Back then, in the Garden before the fall, Adam and Eve must have lived peaceably with the cold bugs.  But now we do not, and I'm not sure there is a great personal lesson to be learned from this form of suffering.  It happens because we live in a fallen world, and sometimes bad things happen to us for no other reason.
Although we can draw closer to God in all of our sufferings, not all of them bring a message. It is part of the human condition, only to be rectified when we get to heaven, and if I don't survive this cold (and it sure feels like I won't), fortunately it will be my last one. I am hoping to be blessed to be around long enough to get many more colds.