Parenting and Unexpected Challenges

Sleep deprivation, a newborn's incessant crying, and an unexpected bout of sickness that seized control of our household.  Through it all, we discovered the strength of faith that outlasts the disarray of our earthly lives.

Let's explore Jesus' teaching on storing treasures in heaven and how, despite the challenges thrown at us, our faith remains firm, tucked safely in the divine beyond.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Sometimes a person just needs to pray God, don't hurl vomit from the sky. That was me last week. I'd spend a few hours of red-eyed delirium rocking our newborn to sleep. For all our modern contrivances, there's nothing so throwback as the superstitious rhythm one tries to find and harness while at this sacred pleading dance, just go to sleep. I begged the wide-eyed tyrant in my arms. Hours later she acquiesced. I trudged to my room, my bed. I flopped onto pillow, weak. I closed my eyes and the screams began. My other children had awoken, of course. I opened my eyes, lifted head from pillow and trudged from my room, weak.

Speaker 1: 0:57

I opened the door to my son's room and joining the screams came the smell of vomit. It was everywhere, the smell and actually the vomit the wall, the bedrails, the reading chair, the floor, the bunk below and, yes, the little sleeping boy that lay there. You see, my oldest son had projectile vomited over the rail of his top bunk. How so much vomit was available to his slight body, as anyone's guess. When you may think that you're squeamish about this stuff, I am more so. Like when my wife went to have a baby, I passed out just on the way into the hospital. I can't stomach these sorts of things. Pardon my language, but there I was, scrubbing bodies and walls and soaked sheets and blankets, all in the dead of night In the bedlam of Barf. I asked him why he had chosen to do this deed over his rail, up and over his rail. Then my four year old triumphantly held up a little stuffed monkey, whom he creatively named Little Monkey, and answered I don't want to get Little Monkey wet. Of course his brother was collateral damage, but Little Monkey was a protected class.

Speaker 1: 2:12

The coming nights were similarly adventurous, as a stomach bug volleyed back and forth between the two boys. God don't hurl vomit from the sky. I recall muttering as I again trudged towards screams in the night. And it is how life feels, how life sometimes goes. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. We trudged from one step back to the next. Life is vomit. Nothing is sacred, nothing is spared. That isn't true, is it? For even in this metaphor, little Monkey was bone dry. And even in this life at its worst, there are places secure from the mess. Jesus told the crowd store up your treasures in heaven. He mentioned their safety from moth and rust. But vomit too, I think, plays. My faith is safe. My hope is secure. It is tethered in the great beyond, to the great beyond, and where my treasure is. That truly is where I am, also where I belong, where I abide. God, please don't hurl vomit from above, but even if the muck of life rains down, hold my faith safely in your loving beyond. Amen.