It was a week before Christmas. Our 6-week-old son, Ben, was terribly sick. So sick that he could hardly breath. He had RSV, and things progressed from the doctor’s office, to the hospital, to the hospital with the best PICU in our area. Thankfully, our story ended on Christmas Eve when we took Ben home. Today, he is staring down his fifth birthday, and I am still convinced that the lovely nurses at PICU gave him some kind of “performance enhancing drugs” because he not only grew rapidly after departing the hospital, but he has also never slowed down!
What absolutely destroyed me from that experience was not our situation. To be sure, RSV is very serious for a six-week-old. But, the odds were vastly in our favor. Next door, however, was a little child fighting something –I don’t know exactly what—and what destroyed me was the Christmas tree. You don’t put a Christmas tree in a temporary room. You only put it in a room that you will be spending the entire season in.
I can still see that tree in my mind’s eye.
I pray for those parents and those kids.
In fact, I recently was driving to Chicago for a speaking engagement and drove by the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s hospital. As I drove by, I turned the radio off and just began praying out loud for the parents, kids, and doctors:
Please heal one kid, Lord.
Please guide each doctor, and give them wisdom, insight, and focus.
Please help each parent persevere. Comfort them with the peace that surpasses all human understanding of how this could be going on.
We live in a fallen, broken, world. And it sometimes sucks.
I don’t know how to transition, so here is the point of this post:
The next time you feel that work is “out of control,” and the stress is getting to you, thank God for work and its problems.
In fact, the beauty of work problems is that they are only work problems.
Let’s own that.
And to every mom or dad that can identify with anything written above, I am praying for you. I can think specifically of a mom and dad we know that is walking their daughter through an unimaginable situation, and inspiring us all in the process. I can also think of a mom and dad at our church, whose son is in heaven after a brain tumor. I’m still amazed at your courage and faith (and I still want to do coffee, so come on over to HP).
If you can identify with any of this, let me know.
I will pray for you, too.
Deal?