*cough cough, sniffle sniffle*
As may be evident, I’m just now getting over a pretty bad cold. I usually do pretty well at avoiding all the viruses that run rampant at school, spending most of the year in pretty good health. This time however, after a visit to one of our elementary schools, both me and the other ALT in Kurihashi both came down with horrendous colds. This was particularly bad timing as it happened to coincide with my birthday depressingly well; the worst of the symptoms hitting me during my birthday weekend. While not a terribly pleasant way to spend your birthday, it did recall to memory an interesting story from my youth which I thought would be fun to share.
In March of 1988, on the day I was to turn a most respectable eight years of age, I managed to come down with the flu. This wasn’t a very good sign for this most auspicious of days, and showed signs of becoming a trend (a few years later one of my favorite comedians, the beloved John Candy, would manage the singular feat of dropping dead on my birthday). Now no one likes to be sick on their birthday, but being laid up with the flu—a sterilized couch, can of 7-up, and throw-up pan being your only companions—is a particularly bad way to go. Being like most eight year olds, the biggest bright spot of my day was of course weekday afternoon cartoons. That year especially was great as it saw the introduction of the first in a long line of fantastic Disney cartoons with the premiere of Duck Tales. Man, did I love that show. Duck Tales was great: it had excellent characters, driving storylines, and well executed animation. I absolutely never missed an episode. Now the week had already kind of gotten off to a bad start as Fox had announced that they were running repeats all that week. It wasn’t only bad enough that they were running a rerun of my favorite TV show on my birthday, but then I had to get sick on top of it. For an eight year old, my life literally felt on the verge of falling apart. They might as well take away all my favorite toys, and kick me in shins for good measure.
As I was laying there in my addled state, I started reflecting on some of my favorite episodes to help get me past the pain and keep me from bawling like a baby. Though there were many good episodes to have come out that past year, none could surpass in complete unadulterated brilliance the supremely excellent Launchpad driven episode “Double-O-Duck”. This is the episode that would later spawn the series Darkwing Duck, one of my all time favorite TV serials. It had everything, from spies, to high tech gadgets, to evil crime syndicates bent on world domination. If there was any episode worth seeing, this was the one. The trouble was however, that as far as reruns went, this is the one episode that never got re-aired. It was like the Babe Ruth of Duck Tales episodes, if Babe Ruth was forced to sit on the bench and never allowed to step up to the plate. As I sat there, contemplating these thoughts, a single vision started to push its way through all the fever induced clouds.
Pray.
If there was anyone who could make the impossible happen, it was God. My logic in this matter was completely sound. If I prayed to God, He in His infinite mercy would see me in my weak and ravaged state (on my birthday no less!), and would take pity on me—granting me this small miracle. And so I prayed. I prayed long, I prayed hard. I made my case before the all Supreme Being, and asked that He would hear my cries. Despite the ridiculousness of all this, my prayers in this were quite sincere, and as the time for Duck Tales approached I turned on the TV with anticipation. And in one fell swoop God demonstrated both His omnipotent power, and His ineffable love. To my eight year old brain, two huge points were nailed home that day. Not only is prayer powerful, but God truly listens to us—even to prayers about our favorite TV episodes.
As I watched my favorite episode of Duck Tales that fateful day, I felt God’s love in a way I hadn’t experienced it before, and reflected well on it (as well as an eight year old can reflect) as my birthday took a turn from bogus, veered to gnarly, and headed straight on to radical. Bodacious!
My friend Nate is currently spending the week with me here, and I’ll have more up on that in the coming week as I show him around Japan. Stay tuned!
