I sometimes wonder how doctors explained puzzling illnesses before the discovery of viruses.  So often I'm told, "It's a virus, so there's no use giving you antibiotics."

Viruses are more mysterious than bacteria.  Compared to the sizable bacterium, viruses are minuscule, less than a hundred-thousandth of an inch long.  Whereas bacteria are complete living organisms, which given appropriate nutrients, reproduce themselves, viruses are the ultimate parasitic form of life.  They reproduce themselves by entering another organism and commandeering its reproductive mechanism.

When a virus visits a cell, it literally eats it out of house and home.  Viruses penetrate the cell using a protein corkscrew as a weapon.  Once inside, the virus uses the cell's reproducing equipment to copy itself until all the cell's supplies are used up.  At this point, the cell wall bursts open to release hundreds of thousands of new viruses, which promptly go to work repeating the process in other cells.  The challenge is to develop antiviral drugs which will tackle viruses as effectively as antibiotics attack bacteria.

So next time your doctor says "It's a viral infection," be thankful that in most cases the body still wins the final battle against these lean, mean intruders.

MOVING BEYOND MATTER
by Debbie Hughes

Viruses are opportunistic cells.  They can live outside of a host but in order to replicate, they must enter a living cell.  There, they plunder the cell's protein for raw materials and commandeer its energy and fabricating abilities for their own purposes.  Under these conditions viruses multiply rapidly.  After using up the cell's resources, they break out to infect healthy cells and continue the process.  Viruses bring death at a cellular level, and sometimes even to the organism as a whole.

Parasitic organisms get a bad name - and for good reason.  They take what they need to provide for their own survival at the expense of their host.  In ancient Greek times, professional dinner guests were often tagged with this label.  Today, we often think in terms of computer viruses - those feared files which run their own programs to the destruction of our software and the loss of our data.  In any event, viruses are bad news.

When we consider our spiritual health, we can note that although we aren't as bad as we could be, we certainly aren't as good as we could be either.  We have to acknowledge that we harbour evil in our heart which gets worked out throughout our life.  And if we think that, because we are no worse than others and better than most, we are off the hook, we are mistaken.

When we give asylum to spiritual viruses - that is moral and ethical rebellion against God - spiritual illness results.  We sometimes call this sin.  Sin separates us from God and this results in spiritual death.

The insidious nature of spiritual viruses allows us to carry on with our physical  life without conscious awareness of the state of our spiritual health.  Sometimes the realization of our true condition hits home forcefully during stressful times.  In other situations, there is a growing sense that something is wrong.  Today, check out the status of your spiritual health.