A Sobering Reminder

9/27/2011

Last Friday night our one-year-old son James came down with croup. Having no previous experience with these symptoms, I was freaking out as my little boy coughed uncontrollably and gasped for breath, his skin hot to the touch. As he cried out of discomfort and the fear of not being able to get a descent lungful of air, I nearly cried myself. Fortunately, Alissa knew the signs and was able to direct me to look up the best home treatments, and we were soon able to help him breathe comfortably again.

Yet it’s not over. When we read that first night that this illness normally takes three to seven days to run its course, I could hardly imagine a whole week of sleepless nights worrying about whether our son could breathe. The reality has proved much more bearable than that as his symptoms become less acute and as both he and we know what it takes to help him calm down and breathe evenly, but even so the experience has been sobering. On Saturday we were greatly encouraged to see him on his feet, ambling around, and babbling again. But the sounds he made were unrecognizable as his voice. The clear, buoyant tones of a young voice were replaced with a gruff, strained rasping, more familiar from the mouth of a lifelong smoker than from my son. And even if he was in a good mood, just one cough could cause him to wince and look at us with the weak cry of pain and frustration.

And I would think to myself, I know that feeling. I know what it feels like to be fed up with the constant dilemma between needing to cough for the hundredth time in a morning to be able to breathe properly and the anticipation of that sharp pain from a raw throat. It’s annoying as an adult, but I can cope. But I’m not used to it in my one-year-old. By and large, his sixteen months out of the womb have been safe and happy, where his daddy and mama are there to drive away pain and fear. What now can I say to him? Welcome to life? This is just the beginning: you have decades’ worth of pain, anxiety, and grief to look forward to? God has been good enough to design children to bounce back quickly at this age. But even as James recovers his voice, much to my relief, the abuse it has taken in the past few days, followed by other strains over years to come, will slowly transform his unmarred throat and vocal cords into those of an adult. Likewise the pain and anxiety of this one little illness will be followed by other experiences that teach him mom and dad can’t always do anything about it, and they will change him from the innocence of childhood to the hardness of aging. And the impression is made in a personal way once again that this is a fallen, broken world.

Romans 8 talks about creation groaning under this decay it has been bound to as if with chains since man first fell into sin. Creation waits and groans for renewal, to be set free from this corruption. It too once had an infancy before it knew pain or grief. We have never seen it. I can hardly imagine the glory of that first creation or the grief of its defilement that Milton tries to describe in Paradise Lost. But every once in a while, I encounter a picture of what it might have been like: a new snowfall blackened by slush from the road; the first flowers of spring wilted by a night’s frost; a one-year-old child gasping for air he had always before taken for granted. The cynical will of course say, “That’s parenting. Deal with it.” But those who take the hope of our salvation seriously know that this is not how it’s supposed to be, and in the end it is not how it will be. I’ve talked with several parents just in the past couple days who sympathize with us as they remember vividly the first time their child had croup or some other illness that frightened them. Paul says in Romans 8 that we too are groaning along with creation “as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons,” which is not only spiritual but “the redemption of our bodies.” Unless Jesus returns first, I will die at some point. I know that. And I will have hardship and loss to undergo until that time. And though I rarely have the motivation to consider it, I know that so will James. We live in a world where innocence and wholeness give way to corruption and decay. But a day will come when that pattern will be turned on its head, and all that is old and worn out will be made new. Beyond all human power or imagination, innocence is restored and “the former things,” like pain and crying, will “have passed away.” That day may be hard to see now. “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”