Hospitals have become a bit of a second home for us. As a child, I didn’t have much exposure to medical facilities or people who frequently needed significant medical care.
In college, I bounced around a bit hoping to land on the right major and dreaming of all sorts of fulfilling futures. Med school, writing, and psychology were in the back of my mind but I ultimately landed on nursing, after much prompting from the Holy Spirit (and a little of my own back-talk). Ha!
I fell in love with it immediately. Not long into my studies, my own body started to demonstrate new symptoms and I sometimes found myself as the patient instead of the eager student nurse. I got a unique perspective of seeing how hospitals function as both the one needing care and the one providing it.
My husband and I married before the start of my senior year, and a few months later, I became pregnant with our first daughter. I look back now and laugh at my pregnant self, trying to hide the morning sickness in between caring for patients during clinicals. When she was born, we decided I would stay home to care for her, thinking I would one day pursue a hospital job.
Months passed and I began to question why God called me to nursing school, much less allowing me to nurture my love of biology and medicine as well as caring for others, but confining me to the life of a stay at home mother. What was the point in all of that training to see it wasted?
God must have smiled to Himself, knowing that His sovereign plans always unfold in His own time and not mine. He put us on the path of adoption, and then led us to a specific little boy. One who would prove to need a nurse for a mother.
Hindsight is much clearer than our present viewpoint. While I was studying to pass the NCLEX for my license, my son’s birth mother was preparing to give birth to a child who would have complex medical needs.
When CJ came home to us, he finally had consistent access to medical care, and thus, his list of diagnoses grew rapidly. We had no idea he would require the level of complex care he does. I had spent several years mastering g-tubes and wound care, never imagining one day it would be my own child’s feeds and bandages I would manage.
As I type, CJ is in a room across the hall undergoing a two-and-a-half-hour MRI. Today we have already completed an echocardiogram and CT of his head and spine.
Next month, he will have a massive, life-changing surgery. We will spend yet another week in the hospital during his initial recovery. The risks of this surgery have shaken me to my core.
Almost 10 years after his adoption, I can no longer count the number of procedures and hospitalizations we have endured together. His life has been far from easy, but every time a new complication arises, my mind wanders back to those nursing classes and hours of practice in the lab.
Hospitals can be overwhelming places. The bustle of doctors and nurses, the sterile smell that assaults you when the door opens, and the medical jargon that flows so rapidly from your provider’s mouth is enough to make your head spin, especially when the topic is your own son.
I can look back now and see that God was preparing the path for CJ. He saved CJ’s life through adoption but He also cared enough to drop him into the arms of a mother who is not rattled by hospital surroundings. While I am not a working nurse, I am so grateful that God’s gracious providence saw fit to remove any potential anxiety around hospital settings before we found ourselves constantly immersed in them.
Today, I have watched as my little boy continues to navigate scary things in a body that does not work properly. His body and mind are forever scarred by a past that few could imagine. Sometimes I look around the waiting room and feel a twinge of jealousy. I see families who have all healthy children, only popping in for a well-checkup. Or an able-bodied child who has to navigate a cast for a few weeks due to a broken but healing bone. Or even sick children, who have the resiliency to tackle their treatments because they do not have a long history of complex trauma.
God’s grace prevents my sinful jealousy from lasting long.
A moment ago, an entire team brushed past me, pushing a small incubator with a tiny baby connected to every wire imaginable. I watch CJ wheel himself past a vending machine, making room for a family pushing another wheelchair, but this one carries a child who cannot wheel herself, her body rigid from her own diagnoses.
When you are immersed in the world of parenting special needs, you have no choice but to become aware of children all around you. But in this exclusive club, you see far more than an average, healthy family. The complexities these families live with daily would boggle the minds of parents with relatively healthy children.
Even in this, God has taught me so much. Everyone’s hard is hard. It doesn’t matter if the worst you endure is a broken arm. That is still hard. It is hard to parent a child recovering from an easy procedure of putting tubes in their ears, and it is hard caring for a child who needs weeks in a hospital writhing in pain from massive surgery.
I chuckle sometimes when well-meaning people say, “God only gives these special kids to special parents.” Special? Ha! I am the most average person you could ever meet. God did not give children with extra needs only to parents who have an abundance of patience or super capacities for stress. We are just normal parents, adapting to the complexities the same way a frog sits in a pot of boiling water. Only we must learn how to call for help before it burns us permanently.
As a parent, the hardest procedures for me are the ones resulting in tremendous pain for CJ. He has survived so much already, sometimes I want to raise my fist to the ceiling and ask God how it is fair to require him to endure more. In the thick of emotion, it can be hard to see how God could possibly be using this for anyone’s good.
I often find myself flipping to favorite Bible chapters when life feels crushing. 2 Corinthians 4 has come to mind several times lately.
“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.”
Jars of clay was a metaphor commonly used in those days to represent our human weakness. As Christians, our breaking bodies carry within them the light of all Life.
Paul is reminding the church of Corinth that in this world, we will see struggles of all kinds. Some are the result of our own foolish sin. Some problems arise from the sins of others. Furthermore, the curse of our broken world affects us all. Sickness and death are not always results of personal sin, but rather because our greatest enemy runs amuck amongst the sons of man.
Attacks against our bodies, relationships, souls, and hearts come in many forms, but I reckon Paul is almost shouting with joy as he writes. Christian, do you not see that we are afflicted in every way, knocked down, pressed under great force, and even persecuted, but inside these fragile bodies and fickle emotions we hold fast to a great torch? In Jesus was life, and that life is the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1)
Jesus is this great treasure hidden inside of us. He is the hope shining brightly, and the darkness will never overcome him.
This news should cause your heart to race. Your soul, if held captive by the Spirit of God, should be rising up in praise at this truth. A second wind, if you will, as you press into running another lap.
Our lives are full of hurt, but we are not destroyed under the weight of it all. The Potter has fashioned our fragile clay jars to hold the light until the end.
Friend, whatever is making the walls cave in around you, know that Jesus has not abandoned you. No. Instead He has provided all you need to persevere through it all, no matter how painful the journey may be.
It doesn’t matter if you are shuffling your child to speech therapies to correct a stutter or monitoring seizures, wondering if this will be the one that cannot be controlled. Of course, the levels of stress vary with each family’s number of needs. But it does not negate that all hard things are hard to those enduring them. In each need, Jesus pours out the grace to endure.
Do not grow weary in doing good, my friends. Press on for the crown of life. And when the enemy whispers that you do not contribute to the kingdom work because your schedule is filled to the brim with caring for your baby, know that Jesus shines in you where you are. Humble faithfulness preaches in a way that loud evangelism does not, and vice versa. Serve the ones God has put in your charge, including your children. Thank God for the gracious task and gift He has given to you in your children.
And for believers who do not walk the path of special needs, thank God for the gracious gift of margin in your life to serve others outside of your home in ways others can only dream of. In His wisdom, He has equipped His light to shine through you in different ways.
His light must illuminate all corners of darkness, so acknowledge your territory and hold your torch high.
If we are a body, then it makes sense that each part is serving in the capacity given to it. No part is greater than another. Walk in patience and understanding with each other, for we cannot truly understand the daily challenges another faces.
We are all walking home. Some are taking strangers by the hand and bringing them along, some are pushing their children’s wheelchairs over the rocky roads. May we acknowledge the different tasks we have been assigned and exhort one another, so that we may cheer when we hear, “Well done,” proclaimed over our fellow travelers.
