It’s a Wednesday night and you are at a church prayer meeting when somebody runs in from the parking lot yelling, “Turn on a radio, turn on a radio!”
And while the church listens to a little transistor radio with a microphone stuck up to it, the announcement is made: “Two women are lying in a Long Island hospital dying from a ‘mystery’ flu.” Within hours it seems, this thing just sweeps across the country.
People are working around the clock trying to find an antidote. Nothing is working! California, Oregon, Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts.
It’s as though it’s just sweeping in from the borders.
And then, all of a sudden, the news comes out. The code has been broken. A cure can be found. A vaccine can be made. It’s going to take the blood of somebody who hasn’t been infected, and so, sure enough,all through the Midwest, through all those channels of emergency broadcasting,
Everyone is asked to do one simple thing: Go to your downtown hospital and have your blood type taken. That’s all we ask of you. When you hear the sirens go off in your neighborhood, please make your way quickly, quietly, and safely to the hospitals.
Sure enough, when you and your family get down there late on that Friday night, there is a long line, and they’ve got nurses and doctors coming out and pricking fingers and taking blood and putting labels on it.
Your wife and your kids are out there, and they take your blood type and they say, “Wait here in the parking lot and if we call your name, you can be dismissed and go home.”
You stand around, scared, with your neighbors, wondering what in the world is going on and if this is the end of the world.
Suddenly a young man comes running out of the hospital screaming. He’s yelling a name and waving a clipboard. What? He yells it again! And your son Stinky tugs on your jacket and says, “Daddy, that’s me.”
Before you know it, they have grabbed your boy. woo-hoo!
Hold on! And they say, "It’s okay, his blood is clean. He’s a mean little bastard, but his blood is pure.
We want to make sure he doesn’t have the disease. We think he has got the right type." Five tense minutes later, out come the doctors and nurses, shaking their heads and holding the bite marks on their fingers … some are even laughing. It’s the first time you have seen anybody laugh in a week, and an old doctor walks up to you and says, “Thank you, sir. Your son’s blood type is perfect. You mind if we off the little SOB?”
Then the gray-haired doctor pulls you and your wife aside and says, “May we see you for moment? We kinda have to beat the kid to death slowly in order to froth up the blood properly. OK by you?”
“H-how long will you have to beat him?”, you ask.
And that is when the old doctor smiles and he says, “Oh, three or four days! With a cat-o-nine-tails Would you sign?”
In numb silence, you do.
Then they say, “Would you like to have a moment with him before we begin?”
Hell, no—but they lead you in anway, where Little Stinky lies strapped to a table saying, “Daddy? Mommy? What the fuck is going on? You bastards!” You take his hands and say, “Son, remember that nature special on PBS where the lion bit thew wildebeast to death?”
And when that old doctor comes back in and says, “I’m sorry, we’ve GOT to get started! This is gonna be fun. Can you leave?”
Can you walk out while he is saying, “*You goddam motherfucking sonsbitches, I’ll crawl back from the grave and rip your hearts out!? *”
And then next week, when they show the video on FOX of your kid being eviscerated, some folks sleep through it … some folks don’t even come because they go to the lake or the seashore … some folks come with a pretentious smile and just “pretend” to care. Would you want to jump up and say, “MY SON DIED FOR YOU! DON’T YOU CARE?”
If you are totally ashamed of GOD for what HE has done for you pass this on.