Ignorance Is No Bliss

Since early tomorrow morning I will be on a flight to Ohio, returning sometime Monday afternoon, I've decided to post one more article before I leave. A new teaching on the church of Thyatira should also be up on the Hand of Help website, before the weekend.

As far as I know, I have two allergies. I am highly allergic to bee stings, and aspirin. I found out I was allergic to aspirin after being stung by a bee, and my mother gave me two little white pills to help with the swelling and the pain.
I was in Romania at the time, the beginning of summer, looking forward to a few days of soccer and apple picking, when out of nowhere, a bee got inside my sunglasses, and after growing annoyed at my flailing about, the bee stung me center mass, right on the bridge of my nose. Thirty or so minutes later, my face looked like an over inflated balloon and the pain made my eyes water. As mothers the world over are often overprotective of their offspring, my mother quickly talked me into swallowing the pills she had handed me, saying they were anti inflammatory, and I would be right as rain as soon as they got into my system. The pills she had given me were aspirins, and the swelling got worse. I could barely breathe and now my tongue had swollen, keeping pace with the rest of my face.
It's not that the practice of medicine has evolved much since the revolution in Romania, but the early 1990's was something few can imagine unless they've lived through it, medically speaking. The prevailing thought of the time, was that it was better to just die, than get sick, than to be left at the mercy of doctors, because in the end you would die anyway, it would just take longer and be more painful.
So here I was, a kid who had spent the last six years in the bosom of America, in a third world country, with a constricted esophagus, a swelled head, and not much else.
My mother got scared when she saw I was getting worse, called a doctor, and after paying him his fee upfront, she brought him into my bedroom, where I was laying on the bed taking shallow gasps of air into my lungs.
The man looked at me for a full ten seconds, and said, 'try not to breathe so deep.'
I had a plethora of great comeback lines floating around in my head, like 'did you learn that in medical school or in a gulag?' or, 'great bedside manner, maybe you should just sit on my chest and get it over with', but my tongue was too swollen and I couldn't talk. I tried giving him a dirty look, but I couldn't arch my eyebrows, so I just lay there, while he explained to my mother that he didn't have the medicine I needed, but if she would give him more money he could probably have it within a week.
That day I learned an important, if somewhat painful lesson. Just because we are ignorant of something, it does not mean we will be spared the after effects. Just because I wasn't aware of my allergy to aspirin, it doesn't mean I didn't suffer because I took them. I lay in bed for three days, gasping the hours away, until the swelling started to subside, and I could speak again.
Ignorance is no bliss, in fact ignorance often kills, and if this is true of the physical realm, it is also true of the spiritual realm.
This is the reason I encourage those with whom I come in contact with, and those to whom I minister to feed themselves, to get into the Word, to read, to pray, to meditate, and to know the will of God. Ignorance is no excuse for believing a lie, and some who find comfort in ignorance will have to endure the eternal consequences thereof. The Bible warns us, it admonishes us, it exhorts and instructs us, within its pages we find the answer to every burning question, as well as sure and uncompromising direction. If some are still ignorant, it is because they have chosen it, not because God didn't explain it well enough, or because He omitted something necessary to our spiritual growth. If we hope to be the men and women God expects us to be, than we must do everything that God tells us to do. It's that simple.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.