“Oh, gross!  Mom, this is gross!  It feels all squishy to my hands. I hate to unstop the sink.  It’s got all kinds of gook in the bottom.  It feels yucky!” Mom would look amused and say, “You just put the same stuff in your mouth, and it looks much worse in your stomach.” Of course, I made a terrible face.  As many children have often replied, I quickly piped up, “But that’s different.”

My mom then coined a phrase for me!  She said, “Okay, ‘Miss Nice Nasty’.  You just wait.  Gook in the bottom of the sink will be nothing one day.” 

One thousand diapers, many stopped-up toilets, and countless upset stomachs later, my mother’s words still ring true.  Unstopping the sink is just simply no big deal.  Don’t get me wrong, some things still gross me out, but that is not one of them.  I have seen several documentaries that turned my stomach.

I walked into the room after this documentary was already on TV.  A woman was on the screen with her foot propped up, and she had little worms crawling all over the bottom section of her foot.  Of course, you can imagine the disgust that I expressed at the time. I thought this documentary was about the filth that people lived in, but I quickly realized that her surroundings were not filthy.  So, with a frown on my face, I sat down to see what was going on.  I soon learned the documentary was about a new way to fight infection in Europe.  The worms were maggots.  The doctors had put them on this poor woman’s foot.  I immediately thanked God for living in the USA.

When I got over the initial shock and disgust, I became interested.  This woman had been very sick, and her infection was spreading.  The doctor had tried all different types of conventional approaches, and nothing worked.  He then tried something learned from the battlefields of war.  The doctor put sterilized maggots on the wound and wrapped it!  Can you imagine?  Sterilized flies!  The maggots didn’t eat the healthy skin underneath, because they only ate decaying dead tissue. The wound was miraculously healed.

The narrator then explained how the doctors stumbled onto this knowledge. When soldiers were on the battlefield, the flies would lay eggs on their wounds.  There was no one to care for them so the maggots would just stay in the wound.  When the men came home, the doctors would immediately clean the wound and dress it.  But the infection would get worse instead of better, and the soldiers would die.  The soldiers who had the maggots in their wounds for longer periods were getting better.  From these facts, doctors in Europe began to do experiments on “willing” people, those patients on which conventional approaches had not been successful.

The thought of bugs crawling on me with my permission is totally crazy.  The people on the show said the same thing. One lady said that she was in so much pain that she was willing to try anything.  The idea was repulsive to her, too, but she knew if something did not happen soon, she would die.  The astonishing thing was how quickly she began to see results.

I learned that something I find repulsive has a purpose and can be a blessing.  I always thought that flies, gnats, roaches, and mosquitos were put here as a part of the curse back in Eden.  My finite mind has had a hard time believing there was a purpose for these annoying creatures except to make man miserable.

I learned many things about maggots in that documentary.  I wish it was as easy to learn the lessons of life.  I began to ponder over this gross creature, and how I had been enlightened after all these years.  I began to relate this to my spiritual walk.  Why does it take so long to realize the bad things in life can be good things?  Do most people have blinders on when it comes to difficult lessons?  What about the things we find annoying, or even worse, catastrophic.  I have a friend who was laid off from her job and didn’t understand why.  The bills were still coming in, and she did not see how her family would survive.  A new job opened up making less money, but it was in a Christian environment.  She now looks back at this experience as a time when God was working behind the scenes, but when she was going through the crisis, she thought God had forgotten her.

I know of several people whose health problems enabled them to be a greater witness for Christ.  Even though David Ring has Cerebral Palsy, he has reached thousands sharing the goodness of God.  Ron Hamilton, Patch the Pirate, has reached thousands of children despite losing one of his eyes to cancer.  Since he had to wear a patch over his eye, he asked God how he could use this handicap.  I wonder at what point those men started looking at something bad as something good.

The Bible has several instances of men and women going through something that would appear to be bad but turns out to be a blessing.  How could something as evil as being sold into slavery end up being good?  How could being forced to marry a foreign king end up saving a race of people?

In your life and mine, there are many instances where things seem bleak.  Bad things are happening around us, and we see no escape. We feel God has left us for the worms.  Perhaps a hardship is eating at some infection in your life.  I know that I have seen ways God has helped me grow through difficult times by letting the worms eat at the infection that is seeping into my life.  When I tried to fight the lessons or refused to learn from them, they remained a catastrophic and negative experience; but when I have allowed God to teach me, I have come to appreciate the struggles.  At times it has taken many years to find what God had planned through the pain.  I am also aware that some things I won’t understand until I get to Heaven.

If you look deep in your heart, God will show you some reasons for your struggles, as He showed Paul about his thorn in the flesh.  Sometimes, we really don’t want to know why because we are more comfortable feeling sorry for ourselves and making excuses for our shortcomings. We must really fight the temptations to choose this path.

I have a new respect for maggots.  I learned about a new medicine that has actually been here from the beginning of time.  Maybe there is a spiritual medicine that God has been trying to give us for years, and yet we refuse to take it.  Who is really being hurt?  We would like to think ignoring the spiritual lessons will only hurt ourselves, but it hurts all who come in contact with our lives.  So, let’s take the medicine God has allowed to come into our lives and work with it.  We will be surprised at the result.

Mrs. Worthington has five children and twelve grandchildren.  She serves as Principal of Pathway Christian Academy in Goldsboro.