Joy and Pain

The night before my husband and I got married, he asked me if I was really sure this was what I wanted. He explained to me how being a military couple would be harder work, that we'd face months even a year without the other. He told me that most of the time duty would come before me. He'd probably miss the birth of our kids, anniversaries and holidays. We even talked about the possibilities of him being broken by war, injuries, personality changes... even death. And as scary as all that sounded to me at sixteen years old. I didn't care. I knew that, in that moment, he was what made me happy and I was willing to go through everything he mentioned, if it meant I had a few months of happiness in his arms. I took a risk, knowing I would probably get hurt, for love. 

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” C. S. Lewis

I strongly believe that all things in life worth having come with pain. When a soldier receives a medal, it's not for sitting at a stateside base all day filing paperwork. It's because they did something risk taking, something honorable, something that probably caused them a lot of pain. When a young couple welcomes a new child into the world, it's not without suffering hours of labor and months of being uncomfortable. When you learn to ride a bike, don't you fall off many times and get hurt, before you finally get the hang of it?

 When I gave birth to my fourth child, I never knew the amount of pain I would feel, throughout the course of his life. I never knew that I'd have to spend months by his side in a hospital, losing sleep, forgetting to eat, and slowly losing my mind. I never fathomed that there would come a day that a team of doctors would take me into a small room, ask me to sit down and proceed to tell me that my son was going to die, not tomorrow, maybe not even next year, but someday sooner then later, my son was going to die. The pain that pierced my heart that Tuesday morning, was unfathomable. And once I was back in his small hospital room in the pediatric critical care unit, I found myself wondering, would could I do to lessen this pain? What could I have done to stop it in the first place?

And that's when I remembered the night before I got married, the night my husband and I decided to start trying to have a baby, the day my husband deployed for war, and the first time I rode a bicycle... All the risks we had previously taking in life. We took each one of them knowing that there would be pain, but the joy that would come with that pain was worth it. The joy of knowing Handsome is worth the pain I feel. The warmth that overcomes my soul every time my precious boy smiles is worth the lack of sleep. The pride of seeing him pull through every health setback he has been faced with is worth the affliction we feel as we watch him get sicker. 

We aren't cursed with a chronically ill child. We are beyond blessed to not only have him in our lives, but to have him fill our hearts and his sweet spirit to warm our souls.