Sick Days

I hate being sick. I truly, truly hate it. And I've been sick more recently than probably any other time in the rest of my life. I usually have a very good immune system. I usually only get sick every few years. It was rare for me to get sick two years in a row, much less more than once in a single cold/flu season.

But this year has been different. I got a cold in October that lasted for almost 2 weeks, and now I have the flu, with a fever and a nasty stomach component. It makes me wonder if this has to do with the new job. In years past, I've been in school, surrounded by essentially the same people for months at a time, and those people also existed within limited social circles and locations. Now I see more than 400 people per week, and shake hands with most of them. And all of those people exist in various social networks and have different patterns of movement, including more than a dozen schools and hundreds of different workplaces around the city. It has made me wonder whether, between stress and the constant bombardment of germs from all those different people and places has increased my chances of getting sick.

To my pastor friends out there: did you notice an increase in how often you got sick in your first years of ministry? And if you've been in ministry for longer than that, did your frequency of illness decrease once your immune system got used to the new circumstances?

I know this sounds ridiculous, and I fully believe that being in ministry is worth a slightly increased risk of illness. But these are the thoughts of my fever-fuzzed mind after too many episodes of Numb3rs. I'd welcome your thoughts.