I want to tell you about a dinner conversation I had this week with my children regarding brain worms and the Holy Spirit.
It’s possible you missed hearing about the surgery at Canberra Hospital of a woman who had gone to hospital with pains in her stomach, diarrhoea, a cough, a fever and experiencing forgetfulness and depression. The hospital did a brain scan, noticed something abnormal, then did another one and noticed it’d moved, so they decided to operate. To everyone in the operating theatres’ surprise, they pulled out a very active worm, about 8cm long.
I read the Canberra Times story about the surgery to our kids who lit up with delight at how gross the whole thing was and then they asked, “how do we know that we don’t have living things inside us like that?” to which I responded “well – the weird thing is, scientists believe that more than half of the cells in your body are non-human. Part of how God’s made us, as dirt people, is that we need other tiny creatures in us so we can digest food, for example.” There was then some amusing discussion about how our flatulence is actually made up of millions of tiny bacteria farts, which I won’t go into more here.
A brief silence set in as everyone ate their pasta, then someone asked. “Wait - how does having the Holy Spirit inside you work? Like, where does he live? Could doctors pull him out?”
Now - I studied at theological college for years; have been a pastor for more than a decade; preach, write community group studies and open the scriptures with people pastorally every week – and yet the questions from kids as they strain to put together a coherent view of the world are easily the hardest things I face.
Here’s what I said. “Even though the Holy Spirit can’t be seen on a scan, just like in the woman he does produce symptoms, but they’re good symptoms – a love for Jesus, an amazement that he loves us, a ‘want’ to see the world put right by Jesus. The Spirit lives in the core of us, not like an apple core, but in the deepest parts of who we are. And the Bible says that, as well as making us more like Jesus everyday, he’s like a stamp on us to prove that we belong to Jesus. God promises that if we’re stamped by the Spirit then nothing can take him away.”
They then shrugged acceptingly, and went back to their pasta.
Friends, the opposite of a parasite is a benefactor. If you are in Christ, you have a non-human person at work in you. One person of the Trinity has made his dwelling in your heart. He's graciously filling you with life, helping you to remember the story you’re in and scraping off elements of our character that don’t correspond with life everlasting.
And I’m very grateful to that little worm for helping me to remember that this week and prompting small questions.
grace and peace,
Steve