One morning as I headed from the parking garage to my office building, I noticed a large poster that greeted every visitor to the building with the message “It’s flu season. Be sure to get your flu shot.” By the time I reached my office a few minutes later, I had begun experiencing all the symptoms associated with the flu. 

Throughout my life, the promise of God’s protection described by King David in the ninety-first Psalm has been a source of great comfort to me. The psalm assures us, “Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling” (verses 9, 10). So, my immediate response to these symptoms was to seek refuge in the Most High by shutting the door to my office and opening a Bible that I often turned to for inspiration.

I don’t recall which passage I opened to that morning, but as I started to pray with the spiritual inspiration I was receiving, it became obvious to me that the message on the poster suggesting that I was vulnerable to the flu unless I had a flu shot, had, without any resistance from me, waltzed into thought. And the speed with which I had gone from feeling completely fine to feeling absolutely awful made me realize that this had nothing to do with what was going on in my body, and everything to do with what was happening in my thought.