"THE NEEDLE"

Rene Phillips Qualls

On October 18, 1972, I received a phone call from my parents.  I was going to college in Bakersfield, California, and living with my Aunt Rachel.  My parents, Ted and Ruth Phillips, and my sister, Janet, were living in Austell, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.  I had been expecting to hear from my family that day, because it was my eighteenth birthday.  After wishing me a happy birthday, my father very soberly told me that, earlier that day, he and Mom had taken Janet to the hospital, and that she was in a diabetic coma.  Stunned by this news, I began to cry.  Dad said that her doctor had told them that, had she not gone to the emergency room when she did, she would have died within hours.  As it was, she was not out of the woods . . . she was very ill.  Janet was fifteen years old.

Thanks be to our Heavenly Father, Janet did pull through, and began her life again.  You see, when a person becomes a "Diabetic," he/she is no longer in control of his/her life.  The disease takes over, determining your future for you, making your decisions.  It decides for you what you eat, what you drink, whether to go barefoot or wear shoes, and how much rest you get.  It picks out a career for you.  You cannot be a pilot.  It is a mood altering disease.  It affects every organ in your body, especially the heart and kidneys.  If you are a woman, Diabetes even goes so far as to decide for you whether or not you will give birth to a child.  If you are Janet, the disease would decide when you die.  But for the one thing she controls, it would take her today.  Her salvation is the needle.

I am a diabetic.  A spiritual diabetic.  Upon accepting the fact that I was a spiritual diabetic, I began to better understand my need for salvation.  I realized just how much I was dependent upon my Savior.  Insulin is the key that unlocks the cells in my body, opening them so that they will be fed by energy-giving glucose (the sugar in my blood).  Christ is the "Key" that unlocks my spiritual cells.  Without His daily injection of spiritual insulin, these cells would starve.  Without Him, my spiritual heart would stop.  My spiritual life would die, and with it, me.  In order for me to live, I need Him every day.  He is my salvation.  Jesus Christ is "The Needle."

I do not view life quite like Janet does.  Her disease colors her view.  I don't live with death in the same urgent way she does.  If she doesn't take her shot of insulin every day, she will die.  The only choice she has, her only control over Diabetes, is her shot.  I share this diabetic odyssey with my beloved sister, and the dictator of her body; yet, only as a bystander do I live her diabetes.

However, there is one need that Janet and I equally share.  We share the need for spiritual lifesaving.  Our spiritual diabetes requires that daily, special attention from our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Because Janet's life is on the line, she lives by her insulin needle.  Because our lives, our most important spiritual lives, are on the line, we both live by . . . "The Needle."
 
 

Copyright © 2000  René Phillips Qualls  (Used by Permission)