WATCH OUT FOR MRS. MOSQUITO!     12/82             DO 1831
--The Price of Paradise!
--A Dream about Tropics Troubles!

         1. I'D BEEN FEELING RATHER SICK & EVEN A LITTLE CHILLED & FEVERISH off & on for the past few days, with my muscles sore & joints sort of aching, & I thought perhaps it was because I was getting too little exercise. One morning this past week I had really gotten very chilled & woke up from a night's sleep fairly early in the morning & was quite cold, & I had to really cover up & had to have Maria put an extra cover over me & snuggle up to me to get me warm. I had two BMs that day, which was rather unusual for me, & the second one was rather soft, which was also unusual, but I never thought anything much of it. I thought, "Well, I just got chilled this morning & I guess that just affected me & my bowels". So I went about my business as usual except I noticed that later in the day I was very tired.
         2. WELL I WAS QUITE SICK & TIRED, SO MARIA REQUESTED PRAYER for me from the Family. Then the next day in the evening I began to have a lot of heavy voluminous gas rolling off from my bowels & a few little gas pains but I chalked it up to what I had eaten the night before, or maybe I picked up a little something in the water & maybe it was the water that was causing me to have the gas & the looseness of the bowels.
         3. THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS IN THE TROPICS THAT CAN CAUSE SICKNESS so I just supposed that it was one of these many different factors, either the chills I had the other morning or something I ate or something I drank or maybe a combination of all three or more.
         4. JUST BEFORE I WENT TO SLEEP I PRAYED & ASKED THE LORD TO FORGIVE ME if there was anything I had done that was wrong. Maria laid hands on me & prayed for me & we claimed several Scriptures on healing. I claimed the promise that, "The prayer of faith shall save the sick, & the Lord shall raise him up; & if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him." (Jam.5:15)
         5. WITH THAT PRAYER I WENT TO SLEEP, WONDERING WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS WRONG with me that I felt so sick & sore & aching & feverish & frequently chilled, which is rather unusual for me in this nice warm climate. I even noticed some mornings I had wakened with my throat rather sore & one morning I even coughed up some phlegm, which is unusual for me. I just had a general feeling of malaise, feeling really very tired all the time, extremely tired & needing to take more naps than usual.
         6. I HAD THIS VERY CLEAR & DISTINCT LITTLE DREAM, very vivid, & I heard the words very clearly & woke up immediately afterward & remembered it with extreme clarity, including the scene & the words, which is the usual case with these significant message dreams that the Lord gives.
         7. IN MY DREAM I SAW A LINE OF SOLDIERS DRESSED IN HOSPITAL CLOTHES, the sort of pajamas they wear particularly in an Army hospital, & they were standing in a row before this speaker who was talking to them, & somehow I knew he was a doctor. It seemed he was standing on a sort of a platform & there were some officers in uniform beside him, & the doctor was talking to them. He said, "This is a medical experiment & you will have some mild reactions but nothing serious."--And somehow or another I knew that they had been inoculated with something. When I was in the Army, they often experimented on us with everything imaginable, from which we often got quite sick, supposedly to protect us from the worst & other real diseases. The inoculation would give us a mild case, & sometimes it wasn't so mild! And they were always telling us, "Oh, this isn't serious, this is a very mild reaction", & we'd get sick as a dog & ache all over! The soldiers were standing there looking at him like dumb sheep, just doing what they were told.
         8. WELL, RIGHT AFTER HE SAID, "IT'S VERY MILD & YOU'LL HAVE SOME MILD REACTIONS & NOTHING SERIOUS, DON'T WORRY", I IMMEDIATELY WOKE FROM THE DREAM. And I thought, "Well, thank You, Lord! I guess whatever I've got, You don't want me to worry! These are very mild reactions I'm getting" & all exactly as this doctor outlined in his little talk to the soldiers. But then the question came to me, "But, Lord, how did I get it? If I have something that those guys have as an experiment, resembling Dengue Fever & Malaria, how did I get it?" And instantly the Lord brought to mind that just a few mornings before I had been bit up by mosquitoes during the night because I had failed to turn on my mosquito repellent stinker.
         9. MOSQUITOES ALWAYS LIKE TO BE NEAR WATER. The eggs are laid in the water & they hatch there. They turn into little wiggle tails that look a little bit like seahorses & they kick their way around on the surface. Then they have a metamorphosis like a caterpillar & they shed their shell or chrysalis, & they pull themselves out of it right there on the surface on the water, spread their wings & fly away to bite more people! The most deadly of the species are the females, the mother mosquitoes who are trying to nourish themselves & their babies, because they have to have human blood to regenerate & procreate.
         10. ACTUALLY MOSQUITOES DON'T REALLY BITE YOU, THEY SUCK YOU. They don't bite at all, they don't even have teeth, they're merely kissing you. They stick their mouth into you & even give you a nice little dose of medicine, which dissolves your blood corpuscles. Then the mosquitoes suck them back through their long needle-nosed mouth which is called a proboscis, whose hole is too small to imbibe whole blood corpuscles, even though they're microscopic. That's the way she sucks in your blood, & if you leave her on your skin long enough, she'll also suck back in her serum or medicine or poison which dissolved your blood corpuscles. If you let her finish the whole process, it won't even leave a so-called bite or itch at all!
         11. BUT IF SHE GETS SHOOED AWAY OR FRIGHTENED AWAY JUST AFTER INJECTING YOU with her corpuscle-dissolving serum, the serum raises the bump & the reaction & causes the strong itching & you say, "I've got a mosquito bite!" Anyhow, when I woke from this dream & asked the Lord, "Well, how did I get sick?", suddenly I was reminded of the mosquito bites I had gotten that night a few days ago!--The Lord was just merciful to me because I wanted to know. He allowed it to go on long enough that I got desperate enough to really pray very earnestly, claim Scriptures, ask the Lord to forgive me if I had done anything wrong, & I guess He felt that He needed to reassure me & encourage me that it wasn't really my fault, but that He had allowed it perhaps even just so I would give the Family a little explanation of the dangers of mosquitoes.
         12. THERE IS A WHOLE STRING OF DISEASES CARRIED BY MOSQUITOES that you must watch for & pray against. Try to protect yourself from them as much as possible by screening & avoiding getting mosquitoes into your house & using insect repellent or these little mosquito machines. You must protect yourself from mosquitoes because they carry a number of serious diseases. Malaria is commonly known to be carried by mosquitoes as well as Yellow Fever, which can be very dangerous, & can also be fatal in some cases, & a number of other mosquito-borne afflictions which apparently the Lord has allowed to lay upon the Egyptians for their sins. But sometimes apparently these mosquitoes mistake us for Egyptians! The Lord says, "I am the Lord that healeth thee & I will lay none of these diseases upon thee that I have laid upon the Egyptians", or in other words, the World. (Ex.15:26) But sometimes maybe we're a little careless or maybe we act a little bit like the Egyptians, we're a little thoughtless & worldly & not cautious enough with ourselves or our children or our housing, our screening, our protection from these tiny monsters, & we have trouble.
         13. PERHAPS YOU'VE BEEN A LITTLE CARELESS ABOUT YOUR MOSQUITO NETTING. The poor little baby can't very well fight mosquitoes, so you need a mosquito netting such as cheesecloth or something thrown over the crib so that it not only covers the top but all four sides, large enough to cover the whole thing. They have all kinds of these nowadays, including a very light, strong nylon. And I suggest you do as we do--use the little skeeter stinkers that use the small rectangular coloured tablets that fade into white as they burn out. The little stinker itself is actually a very small heating unit, a very low temperature hot plate, but it causes the gradual evaporation of repellent that is imbued in this little tablet & apparently, as it turns white, it gets rid of the odour & also the odour gets rid of the mosquitoes before they get rid of you!
         14. SO I SUGGEST YOU TAKE THIS DANGER VERY SERIOUSLY IN THE TROPICS & use reasonable precautions to prevent the entry of mosquitoes, as they usually have a lot of them in almost any tropical area. They breed & thrive in the warmth & the moisture of the Tropics & they also thrive on you if you let them.
         15. BE SURE YOU DON'T LET YOUR DOORS HANG OPEN, as they are masterminds at finding the tiniest little holes they can crawl through. The lady mosquito will sometimes try for hours at the same screen or the same window, trying to find a hole, pecking away & landing in all kinds of different spots.
         16. ONCE THEY'RE IN THEY GO HIDE IN SOME NICE DARK CORNER or under the bed & wait till all is dark & all is quiet & you're sound asleep. They just seem to know when & then they come out & begin to look around for a nice patch of bare skin to land on. And the first thing you feel is a little tickle & maybe a little sort of a sting & you wake up & you hit the spot; but it's too late, she's already gone!
         17. I'VE GOTTEN IN THE OLD TROPICAL HABIT OF AUTOMATICALLY SLAPPING at any spot on my skin where I suddenly feel that little tickle that I know so well, just in case a mosquito has landed. I don't wait to find out or even look to see, I just slam it, particularly in the middle of the night when it's dark, & especially when they're buzzing around my ear & I can hear them right there.
         18. THEY CAN MAKE YOU SICK! MAYBE THAT'S WHY THE LORD LET THIS HAPPEN TO ME--"He saved others, but himself he couldn't save"--in order to learn this lesson & teach you this lesson, that you must be careful about mosquitoes. Maybe you need to have this warning: Watch out for Mrs. Mosquito, she can be dangerous! She sucks until she gets your blood or your children's blood, & she could be infected with some venomous disease, a contagious disease such as the ones we've enumerated--Dengue Fever & Malaria, Yellow Fever & a number of others.
         19. IT'S ACTUALLY BETTER FOR YOU NOT TO GO OUT AT NIGHT if you can help it, as the mosquitoes are usually plentiful after dark, even beginning in the twilight in the late evening when the sun is going down. They are apparently the Devil's pests, evil little creatures, because God's Word tells us that the wicked love darkness because their deeds are evil!
         20. TRY TO AVOID BRINGING THEM BACK IN WITH YOU after having been outside & in the garden. Sometimes even your clothing can be carrying them, so try to shake your clothing out or just wipe your skin off, look down at your legs & your arms to make sure they're not roosting on you already. Then when you're sure you're free of mosquitoes, have someone open the door quickly, or you open the door quickly, & jump inside quickly without mosquitoes! Try not to bring any in with you through the open door.
         21. BE SURE, IF POSSIBLE, THAT YOU HAVE SCREENS ON YOUR WINDOWS, & if not, maybe you'd better put up some. You can get cheap plastic screening & put it over your windows or even use mosquito netting over your windows. In nearly all the houses that we have stayed in, if they didn't have screens, we have temporarily tacked up some kind of screen, usually cheap plastic screening, just using small tacks to fasten it right to the window frame.
         22. MAYBE THAT'S WHY THE LORD LET ME HAVE THIS LITTLE EXPERIENCE & THIS DREAM & this interpretation & even get a little bit sick--in order to be a warning to you & others that you must protect yourselves from these tiny little monsters. They are seemingly infinitesimal little varmints, almost insignificant, but they can really give you a lot of trouble! Anyhow, there's your warning: Watch out for Mrs. Mosquito, she can be dangerous! Please protect yourselves & your children from these dangers, which can be mild in most cases, thank the Lord. He always protects us from the more serious things as a rule, but they can be serious if you are not very prayerful & careful to avoid them & protect yourself from these dangers of the Tropics & the Devil's pests.
         23. MAY GOD BLESS & KEEP YOU FROM THESE DISEASES & THESE PESTS & keep you safely & free of all the other dangers of the Tropics so that you can enjoy the tropical paradise that God has created, but which the Devil has infested with his nasty little pests to annoy you because of the sins of man & the curse upon a wicked World! Amen? GBAKY & keep you free of these pests & their diseases & inconveniences & annoyances & keep you busy for Him, in Jesus' name! Amen! PTL!