Last Friday I started coming down with a cold.

This isn’t strange because we are currently in rainy season which means you can go from pouring rain, to hot sun in a few minutes. Also the dust here (commonly referred to as “Sahara dust”) makes getting colds easy,

I didn’t think much about it because colds aren’t too big of a deal…..

Until it affected my eye

While practicing with some children who would sing in our service on Christmas Eve last Friday, a boy said “Mr. John your eye is starting to swell.” I checked it and underneath my eye there was indeed swelling.

I decided to get cold meds on Saturday, but still didn’t worry too much about it.

Then I woke up Saturday to find SERIOUS SWELLING!

Basically the cold had traveled to my eye, creating an eye infection. It wasn’t painful, but made it look liked I’d been in a bar fight!!!

Saturday morning I hurried over to the private doctor, and got antibiotics as well as cold meds.

Thankfully the swelling has gone down (below is a pic from yesterday). But I learned my lesson.

Small problems can become big ones.

The wise choice would be for me to either go immediately on cold meds, or visit the doctor when things started Friday morning. Instead I chose to put it off, and ended up dealing with a bigger problem.

Life is like that a lot of times.

The small thing we ignore turns out to be huge because we don’t deal with it right away.

Spending Christmas on cold meds and antibiotics isn’t my idea of a good time. But I’m thankful for God’s reminder that the small problems can easily become big ones.