LOOK
FOR JELLY BEANS

Topics: Discernment; Healing; Persistence; Spiritual Perception; Wisdom

Reference: Matthew 16:3

I was working as a nurse in a busy emergency room. We had a regular visitor, Billy, a cute two-year-old with freckles and tousled blond hair. For a year Billy had been in and out of the ER with what the doctors diagnosed as asthma.

The source of the illness was a mystery to the medical staff. Billy hadn’t had asthma as an infant, there wasn’t a family history of asthma, and there weren’t obvious signs of allergies that would cause it. But the symptoms were asthmatic. Sometimes we treated Billy and sent him home; other times he would end up in the pediatrics ICU because his breathing was so labored.

This continued for about a year, and the staff grew fond of Billy. He came yet another day with breathing difficulties, and one of the medical interns decided, on a lark, to look up Billy’s nose. He found a black jelly bean that Billy’s brother had put there a year before. What came out with the jelly bean wasn’t pretty.

We had treated Billy for the wrong condition for almost a year. In light of that circumstance, I put signs on the walls of the emergency room that said, “Look for jelly beans.” When you’re working in the ER, properly diagnosing a problem can be the difference between life and death.

—Nancy Ortberg, in the sermon “Matters of the Heart,” Willow Creek Church Seeds Tape Ministry, South Barrington, Illinois