Sick and Tired

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I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. Seriously. The books all tell you that babies will get sick 4-8 times in their first winter. What they don't tell you is that this means you will also get sick 4-8 times in their first winter.

Kristina, Hannah, and I seem to be in a cycle of passing colds and flus back and forth. Last night, around 5am, I had to gently lift my lungs up from the floor, where I had coughed them out in my sleep, and put them back in my chest so that I could go take care of Hannah who was crying in her crib. She didn't go back to sleep for an hour and a half. And I still haven't been able to clean up the carpet. I think we are going to have to get professionals for that.

But....

Kristina and I are reading a devotional together now, since we finished Wangerin's book on the passion. It is called Wings of Healing. It was written in 1927 by J. Wilmer Gresham, an Episcopal minister, and it has been quite good. Yesterday we read an entry entitled "Take Away the Pain"

"The cry of man's anguish went up to God:
'Lord, take away pain -
The shadow that darkens the world Thou hast
made
The close, coiling chain

That strangles the heart; the burden that weighs
On wings that would soar.
Lord, take away pain from the world Thou hast
made -
That it may love The the more.'

Then answered the Lord to the cry of the world:
'Shall I take away pain
And with it the power of the soul to endure,
Made strong by the strain?

Shall I take away pity that knits heart to heart,
And sacrifice high?
Will you lose all your heroes that life from the fire
White brows to the sky?

Shall I take away love that redeems at a price
And smiles at its loss?
Can ye spare from the lives that would climb
unto mine
The Christ on His Cross?"

Gresham goes on to reflect on the "moral uses of dark things." In the words of Shakespeare, "Sweet are the uses of adversity."

"Dark things are more than tests of our powers. They are possible additions to our resources. We drink the blood of our crosses and are vitalized by the pain we defeat. By quiet patience, by strong fighting, by persistent strength, the very fiber of life itself, out of the dark things that challenge us. We climb the steep ascent of heaven through peril, toil, and pain."

Though I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, I pray that I would find strength in the Lord in the midst of this, and all, my trials. I pray that I will always be thankful, even, or especially, for hard times. Besides, at least I have a wonderful wife and daughter to pass illnesses between. And I think giving my lungs some air has cleared up my cough a little. God is great!

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