On Sunday last,
at 4:50 A.M., I woke up with excruciating stomach pains. This turned out to be fortuitous in the sense
that had I risen at my usual time I would have been in shul putting on my
tefillin, with the problem then being that their removal would have been necessitated a
nano second after completion of the mitzvah.
And more likely than not, I would have been in on again off again mode
for the duration of the davening.
But as we all
know, Hashem sends the refuah before the makkah, so because I had gone to bed
very late on Motzoi Shabbos He put it in my head to daven at a later minyan
Sunday morning.
That piece of good fortune aside, from a pain perspective, the rest of the day was down hill.
But it wasn’t a
total loss because before it occurred to me that I might have a stomach virus,
I had spent and hour and a half agonizing over the prospects of having to deal
with a serious condition of some sort because the pain was bad enough for me to
actually have a passing thought of calling Hatzalah, my irrational fear of
doctors and hospitals notwithstanding.
But given the
aforementioned fears, that thought passed by in warp speed, and in any case I
had already decided to take the very good advice that I had dished out to ya’ll
in EmunahSpeak:
Talk To Hashem First, and go
into conference with Hashem before making my next move.
You can well
imagine the first part of the conversation, but then I remembered that we said
in EmunahSpeak:
If You Feel Blessed …if you
feel that Hashem has bestowed you with extra tov you should feel obligated to
pay back a little more by adding something to your avoda, be it an extra twenty
minutes of learning, a little more kavana in davening, or perhaps resolving to
put more effort into doing chesed.
If that’s the
way to go when one is feeling blessed then it has to be that AND THEN SOME when
one perceives his circumstances moving decidedly south on an express track.
And so I made up
to significantly increase my Sefer Chofetz Chaim seder every day plus an extra
session Erev Shabbos and Motzoi Shabbos.
And then it finally dawned on me that I only had a stomach
virus.
My next thought
was that I got caught in a Heavenly sting operation, but that one passed
quicker than my fleeting mental dalliance with calling Hatzalah.
The truth is
that while I did not figure out from the get-go what was wrong with me, I
realized immediately from whence this makkah came.
As is well
known, Hashem rewards and punishes midda keneged midda (measure for measure),
and it seems that sometime before lights out I had become somewhat irritable
for no good reason concerning something that my wife had said to me. It was nothing from nothing, with the only
thing big about it being the size of the mouth that I ever so briefly
opened.
Whatever was said
must have been hurtful because the next morning at 4:50 A.M……
