In September of 1928, the researcher got back from holidays and
discovered that some of his experiment dishes were contaminated by a
blue mould. Fleming almost dumped everything in disinfectant but
something caught his eye. In one dish, the mould was killing a bacteria
called staphylococci, a nasty bug that caused many of the day’s
worst diseases.
Sure enough, when the doctor isolated the mould’s bacteria killer and
did some experiments, he found it worked against diseases like
pneumonia, meningitis and scarlet fever. Fleming called the world’s
first antibiotic penicillin and knew he was on to something, but
he had only part of the solution.
For bacteria to survive, they must build a cell wall as they
reproduce. But penicillin prevents the building of those walls, so the
bugs die. The trouble was, naturally occurring penicillin wasn’t very
stable, Fleming found it difficult to cultivate, and he couldn’t produce
it in large enough quantities to be useful. For years, he tried to
persuade chemists to find a way of refining penicillin into a workable
form.
That finally happened when Oxford researchers Ernst Chain and Howard
Florey came up with a stable form of penicillin. In 1941, a nearby
doctor had a patient near death because bacteria got into his wound.
The MD used some of the new penicillin and his patient made a
spectacular recovery. Regrettably, there wasn’t enough penicillin to
fully rid the patient’s body of bacteria and he died a few weeks later.
Still, penicillin had shown what it could do. The only reason the
patientdidn’t survive was because there wasn’t enough of the drug, not
because it didn’t work.
Mass production soon started and, by the end of the war, there was
enough of the antibiotic to treat all wounded Allied soldiers. In 1945,
Fleming, Chain and Florey got the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Quick to
praise his colleagues for turning his discovery into a miracle drug,
Fleming also said, “Nature produces penicillin. I just found it.”
There are some telling comparisons in this story to the role of love
in our lives. All around us, there are nasty infections that threaten
to do us in: pride, envy, ambition, bitterness and resentment. Often,
it’s not our wounds that prove fatal, but these spiritual bacteria that
set in once the initial damage has been done. They’re subtle and often
slow-acting, but savage nonetheless.
But they can only survive and reproduce if they build walls. Walls
they keep those nasty infections isolated and protected from what the
Bible calls effects of the Holy Spirit — things like “love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and
self-control.” (Galatians 5:22,23)
At the top of that list is love. It’s the penicillin that prevents
the walls from forming and makes it impossible for spiritual infection
to reproduce. More times than not, we stumble across God’s love when
our lives are the messiest. When that happens, it’s the wise among us
who recognize that something special is going on and take the time to
investigate its awesome potential.
The trouble is that, like penicillin, love is often unstable, hard to
cultivate and difficult to produce in sufficient quantities to be
useful, especially when we’re first learning how to use it. Thankfully,
God provides his Spirit who “gives us desires that are opposite from
what the sinful nature desires,” and — with patience and experience —
we can learn to be “directed by the Holy Spirit” and “follow its leading
in every part of our lives.” (vv. 17, 18, 25) Despite what our critics
say, it’s not that love for God doesn’t work, it’s only that there isn’t
enough of it!
But that changes as Christians come together to share their faith and
service. God produces love. We just find it. And it, too, is
infectious.
By Rick Gamble. Published in Cross Current, the weekly newsletter of
the followers of Christ congregation in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.
Reprint at will in not-for-profit publications. To subscribe to this
free weekly article, send a note to Rick at
rgamble@bfree.on.ca
CHURCH FAMILY NEWS
Whoops! No news this week — I didn’t save the changes to the final
document, so almost all of this week’s congregational information got
blasted inadvertently! Sorry.
Rick