God and the Guinea Worm- What I Think About While Running

I hear a lot of people talk about The Zone. I think I know what they mean but I’m not sure. Most of the runners I know listen to music or books while they run. I see hundreds of them at races, ear buds clamped firmly in their ears, as if they’d die running without something to entertain them.

Now I’m not completely knocking it- to each their own. I do hard strenuous labor all day, and every day to the beat of a jobsite radio. The really bad part is I’ve been hearing the same songs every day for 35 years. AC/DC. Led Zeppelin. White Zombie. I like a lot of that music, but to hear the same catalog day after day, year after year, is soul killing. For Those About to Rock.

So up until now I just run. I let my mind go, set it free. Let it wander where it wants to go. It’s almost a Zen thing, if I knew what that was. It takes me to some strange places.

Today it took me to God and the Guinea worm.

I read last week that scientists and aid groups believe that the Guinea worm will be eradicated from the earth within the next two years. This may seem odd in a world of headlines blaring about endangered species and human-caused mass extinction. So what is the Guinea worm?

It is a parasitic worm that infects only humans. It lives in Sub-Saharan Africa. A water flea carries the larvae in its gut, and when a human drinks unfiltered water they swallow the fleas and the larvae are released.

They then develop into a 3 foot long worm that escapes by breaking through the skin around the ankle or foot. It takes about three weeks for a healthcare worker to wind this worm around a stick and fully remove it. Yank too hard, break the worm and the result is a bad infection with possible amputation. During the weeks it takes to get this worm out the victim is subject to horrible, incapacitating pain.

And humans are the only known host.

I quit practicing my faith some time ago. I don’t know why. Suffice it to say I have a very conservative Christian background. I refer to myself as a-religious. I want to believe in God, but I have questions.

If scientists are right and humans are the only known host of Guinea worms it presents a problem for Christians. It suggests that God created the Guinea worm to plague humans. This, of course, can’t be true since He is a god of love. He would never subject his human children to such torture.

Pat Robertson may suggest that God sent the Sub-Saharan Africans the Guinea worm as a plague for their idolatry. He is given to that kind of mindless frothing.

The other explanation, is that humans and Guinea worms evolved together, and it hasn’t been until now that we have had the technology and science to eradicate an ancestral enemy. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Now the faithful will tell you that when you see God face to face you can ask him this. I can see that conversation.

“So God- what’s up with that Guinea worm?”

“Yeah- that was a mistake. . .”

“A mistake? But I thought. . .”

“Well, we outsourced it. We had to get better control of our supply chain.”

There’s also other logical scientific explanations that Christians would be happy with, such as that humans are a crossover species and that the original host for Guinea worms no longer exists and Guinea worms adapted to us, that our fall from grace allowed our scabby sinful bodies to be attacked by all sorts of diseases and parasites, or that there is yet some unknown host which the Guinea worm still infects and thus all of God’s creations will be preserved.

I guess I still don’t know the answer. But that’s what I thought about on my run while you were listening to music.