I followed some advice

Ready?  Here we go.  Back some time ago, a friend suggested I start a blog.  I laughed, not because I'm opposed to blogs, but because I had no clue how to start one.  I'm still not sure if I know how to start one.  But perhaps this will work.
  So I'm home from work today battling a sickness that is going through the community.  Sore throat, congestion, kind of an achy body.  Just enough to leave me with that lingering, "yucky" feeling.  Sickness serves as a reminder of our frailty as humans.  We realize when we are sick that we are not invincible.  We are driven back to why we get sick in the first place.  It all began in Genesis 3 when the father and mother of the human race made a choice to step outside of the Creator's counsel and bite into the piece of fruit.  From that one monumental decision came a curse from the Creator.  Sickness, disease, thorns, thistles, and pain all became a reality at that point in time.  Sickness is part of that "groaning" aspect described by Paul in Romans 8 where he notes that the whole creation groans.  We long for the day of redemption.  So the physical sickness I experience today is a reminder of that groaning.
  With this sickness comes pain.  Have you ever thought of pain as a gift?  Really, in some ways it is.  Now let me clarify, I don't like pain.  But one way I look at pain is that pain tells me that my nerve endings are still working.  That is a great thing.  In that sense, it is a gift.  Years ago, I remember missionaries coming to our church from the mission field.  They would show us these slides of various tribes and invariably they would show a slide of a person who was missing a hand, or an arm, or a foot, and the missionary would always tells us about how the person had leprosy.  Leprosy, as I understand it, is a disease that attacks the nervous system and makes it so that the person's nerve endings fail to work.  So the person in the slide often lost their hand or foot and didn't even realize it because they can't feel pain.  Sometimes these individuals would rub their fingers off and not feel a thing.  I think we would all agree: Pain would be very valuable to those people.  It is not a good thing when the nerve endings no longer work to alert the person that something is wrong.
  Where am I headed with this?  Besides the nervous system and the nerve endings, there is something else that humans were created with that is really critical.  It is called the conscience.  The conscience is that system that alerts the person that something is not right.  According to Romans 2, even the person who has never read the law of God knows that there are some basic things that are right and wrong (murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, etc.).  The reason this is so is because the Creator has given the person a conscience.  But the conscience only responds to that which is fed to it.  If the person feeds truth to his conscience, he will stay on the path of right.  If he goes against his conscience, he will slowly, but surely harden it until it no longer responds to God's truth.
  We dare not stiff arm the conscience when it speaks to us.  Like pain, let us use this incredible gift that has been given to us by the Creator, to help us walk in righteousness.