Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

We don’t hear much about it anymore but there was a time, not that long ago, when polio was the most feared disease in the world.  It struck without warning, required long periods of quarantine, and often left those who did survive with deformed limbs or forced to use wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces or breathing devices like the iron lung.  Franklin Roosevelt was among its victims.  He was struck in 1921, and it left him paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.

    While polio has been around for thousands of years, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that it began to reach epidemic proportions.  By 1910, polio epidemics were regular events throughout the developed world.  Here in the US, from 1916 onward we would suffer an epidemic in at least one part of the nation every summer.  At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide every year.

     Polio was a plague not unlike what we are experiencing with the Coronavirus today.  As Richard Rhodes described it in his work, A Hole in the World, “One day you had a headache and an hour later you were paralyzed. How far the virus crept up your spine determined whether you could walk afterward or even breathe. Parents waited fearfully every summer to see if it would strike. One case turned up and then another. The count began to climb. The city closed the swimming pools and we all stayed home, cooped indoors, shunning other children. Summer seemed like winter then.”

     Recently, my friend Jeff Winter shared the story of Eleanor Abbott.  She was a retired school-teacher who contracted polio in 1948.  During her convalescence, she found herself surrounded by children suffering from the same horrible disease.  The disease itself was terrible.  On top of it, the children couldn’t see their parents.  No visitors were allowed while they were in quarantine.  Abbott wondered what she could do that might help those children through the long, painful, lonely days.  She came up with a game.  It required no reading or writing.  All it took was an ability to identify different colors.

     Abbott called her game “Candy Land,” and it proved so popular among the young patients that she took it to a leading toy company, Milton Bradley.  It quickly became their best-selling game.  And what did she do with all the money from her royalties?  She donated it all to charities dedicated to children in need.

     As you probably know, two vaccines were ultimately developed for polio: the first in the mid-fifties by Jonas Salk, and then another in the early sixties by Albert Sabin.  I can still remember standing in line and receiving my dose which was mixed with a sugar cube in a little paper cup.  Because of those vaccines, today the disease has been all but eliminated throughout the world except in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

     We are going to get through this Coronavirus.  The quarantine has been difficult.  Thirty million people have lost their jobs.  But it wasn’t that long ago that this country endured a similar struggle with polio.  That one lasted fifty years.  God willing, this one is going to be far shorter.  God hasn't abandoned us, but God does have a part for us to play.  May He grant us the grace to persevere, and the heart to bring a little bit of light into the lives of those in need – just like Eleanor Abbott so long ago.

“Let your light so shine before others that they might see your good works, and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)