More Than We See

I was watching House on TV last night, whose new season premiered last week. It's one of my favourite shows right now, along with Boston Legal and Family Guy. In this episode, a fifteen year old girl from the previous episode returned with a major crush on Dr. House. She kept returning to his hospital with fake maladies and tried to seduce him repeatedly. Despite the hospital's restraining order against her, House got a kick out of it and his ego enjoyed toying with the situation. Crank that he is, he refused to call the cops on her just because it ticked off his boss, the hospital administrator.

[Spoiler Alert: Do not read the following if you care about watching the episode an dhave not done so yet.]

Towards the end of the episode, he was forced to confront her properly and ensure that she never returned. She was a stalker and he had to deal with it. This introduced an amusing sequence in which he quote various classic movies, explaining that "the problems of two people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." The girl, as you would expect, begins to cry.

At this point, House notices something odd and takes a closer look at her tears, which appear to be somewhat milky in colour. Out of the blue, he asks her if she was in an earthquake recently. Derailed from the point of their discussion, she answers that there was a minor earthquake in California when she was there a month before. Et voila, House pulls another freak diagnosis out of thin air.

Sometimes, earthquakes release certain kinds of spores from the ground into the air. Sometimes, people inhale these spores and it infects their brains. And in rare cases (since all cases are rare on this show), people experience symptoms similar to a mild cold while losing all of their inhibitions. So this girl was not infatuated, she was just sick. House quickly writes out a prescription and, swearing because of his false ego boost, he leaves to solve the other major dilemma of the show.

So the moral here is that all may not be what it appears to be. Sometimes personality disorders and psychological issues are actually biological problems and there are medical treatments available.

In the same way, not all apparent medical problems are biological in nature. We're currently reading the classic book The Bondage Breaker in my cell group. (My "cell group" is a weekly bible study with a small group of friends.) In it, the authors recount their own stories of people that they counseled with issues such as multiple personality disorders that were in fact experiencing demonic attacks. The "voices" they were hearing were real and were not the product of chemical imbalances in their brains.

So while the authors are clear that there are plenty of things that cannot be attributed to spiritual sources, there are some problems that should be. There is more to this life than what we see and we will always need God. Fortunately for us, there is power in the name of Jesus and Christians can rest assured that God can handle anything that Satan tries to throw at us, if we rely on Him.

Ah, nothing like a little television to make me go, "Hmm..."