Every time I hear somebody say “I’m not getting the vaccine because I don’t trust it or I don’t need it,”  I think of my father-in-law who was crippled from polio at age 3, and underwent a dozen operations during his childhood, and years of recovery afterwards. 

“Well, God has my days numbered. If I die of Covid, I die. I’m not going to worry about it.”

“How come you underwent chemo then? And what’s the point of taking that diabetes pill everyday? I mean, if God’s got your days numbered, why seek medical treatment for anything at all? Why get that double-hip replacement? Why bother working out or dieting or generally try to improve your health at all, since, you know, we are all going to end up dead anyway. Shit. Here, have another smoke. Lung cancer is a much better way of dying than Covid. With lung cancer, your family can at least be at your bedside.”

“That’s the problem with you vaccinated people. You are all so mean. You quit wearing masks. You don’t wash you hands. You don’t socially distance.”

“I still do all those things and I’m vaccinated. Unless, of course, I’m with other vaccinated people, then I don’t have to wear a mask or socially distance. I can actually hug them without worrying about whether we are giving each other a virus that might kill us.”

“I wasn’t talking about you. I know you do all those things but a lot of people don’t. A lot of vaccinated people are just being careless. And mean.”

“Mean because they want you to get vaccinated?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, okay. Have you ever considered that the thought of losing you to a deadly virus scares them? Maybe they are just scared of losing family needlessly.”

“They should have more faith.”

“Maybe. But you do know that until you get vaccinated, we can’t hug each other and we can’t be in a room together unmasked, right?”

“I am not going to be manipulated into getting a vaccine.”

“But you’ll be manipulated into not getting a vaccine?”

“Nobody has the right to tell me what to do with my body.”

“How odd to hear those words out of your mouth. Speaking of reading something, I came across a passage out of 18th Century Scotland that you might relate to. This man was sent out by the country’s agriculture board to report on why a particular town was facing famines and suffering so. Here’s what he reported back:

Prejudice stood as another insurmountable bar to all improvements. The ambition of the people, at that time, was not to improve the soil, but to reform the church – not to destroy weeds and brambles; but to root out heresy – not to break up the stubborn soil, but to tread down the whore of Babylon, and the Man of Sin. Their attachment to every bad habit, and aversion to every improvement in agriculture were strong and deeply rooted. In agriculture, as in other sciences, ignorance is the mother of devotion; innovation is always dreaded by the half-enlightened; and the force of prejudice is generally wrong; in proportion to the absurdity of the tenets adopted, or the barbarity of the practices followed.

“Funny, isn’t it? How applicable the words of an 18th Century Scotsman are to 21st Century Americans? It’s almost like we never learn anything.”

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of Will Jesus Buy Me a Doublewide? ‘Cause I need more room for my Plasma TV (Zondervan).