Inculation, Inoculation, and Insulation – the Inoculation

February 21, 2014 by Ruth 14 Comments

Part 2 – Inoculation

in·oc·u·late (ĭ-nŏk′yə-lāt′)
tr.v. in·oc·u·lat·ed, in·oc·u·lat·ing, in·oc·u·lates
1. To introduce a serum, vaccine, or antigenic substance into (the body of a person or animal), especially to produce or boost immunity to a specific disease.
2. To communicate a disease to (a living organism) by transferring its causative agent into the organism.
3. To implant microorganisms or infectious material into (a culture medium).
4. To safeguard as if by inoculation; protect.
5. To introduce an idea or attitude into the mind of.

After my dad died the people from the church with the Bible Bus helped us.  A lot.  They brought food, they comforted us, they cried with us, and they helped care for the four kids of a now widowed thirty-three year old woman who, no doubt, felt lost.

As a result my mother was baptized and we all started to go to church every time the doors were opened.  Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and my mother would be sitting in her rocking chair with my two-year-old brother, my six-month-old sister and her open Bible on her lap.

By this time I was thirteen and a member of the youth group.  We did pretty much everything together from raking the yards of the little old ladies in the church and painting their porches, to having car washes and bake sales to raise funds for church camp, and palling around together even outside of church.

Everything we did was geared toward learning the Bible and hiding God’s word in our hearts. We did Back-yard Bible Drill, discipleship training, and by this time big church.  No more flannel boards with crafts and games.  No, this was the real deal.  We heard the grown-up sermons about the suffering of Jesus, and how it was our fault. We heard the wages of sin were death and death without Jesus meant hell.  We learned that our righteousness was as filthy rags and that Jesus would clean us up.

Line upon line, precept upon precept, doctrine upon doctrine we were inoculated. By this point we believed the genocide of the great global flood was a necessary act on God’s part to cleanse the world of a civilization with only evil in it’s heart all the time.  Sodom and Gomorrah were terribly evil places in dire need of God’s divine intervention.  The slaughter of the Canaanites was an act of righteous religious cleansing.  All the commands of God were righteous – if for no other reason than that he gave the commandment.  What seemed right to us was of no consequence.

Most of all we learned that our identity was in Christ.

Everything we were, everything we had, every fiber of our being was wrapped up in the belief that without Jesus we weren’t good, that we lacked value.  But as Christians, as believers, we were sons and daughters of a King.

There I stood with my stringy hair and freckled face, fatherless, and poor. I was worth something.  I was the daughter of a King.