Been a long time.
I love writing. But I get distracted. Life does that to you. Life also kindly gives you colds. As a little boy, I had pneumonia, bronchitis, ear infections, you name it, I had it. You don’t think about it when you’re coughing up a lung trying to snuggle your teddy bear but all those diseases had a purpose – to make me stronger. Somehow, our bodies need to build our immune system up and unfortunately that means getting sick, fighting it, returning to health and doing that over and over again throughout the course of our life.
Sucks right? God couldn’t have made us invincible to disease or at least held off on miserable flu’s until we were maybe 5 or 6 years old and could understand death wasn’t imminent every time we started coughing and sneezing and snuffling?
Another reminder that life is a big test and we only get one shot to do our best with it. The ups, the downs, the in-betweens. Life is one big battle.
I understand a cold isn’t the end of the world, but to a 6-month old baby, and to the parents of that child, the first cold definitely seems like it might be. Congestion, runny nose, watery eyes, difficulty breathing. Its a lot to put a child through, much less one who still doesn’t know how to walk or crawl yet.
It brings me to an even darker place when I think about all the children out there who have to deal with things even more terrible than the common cold. NO child or parent should suffer through the immense pain that comes along with some of our world’s most dangerous diseases. To see the wonder and beauty in a child’s eyes and to know that they are fighting an incurable disease, it’s truly heartbreaking. The world is unfair.
But that’s what makes children so special. Griffin, our 6-month old still smiles, still raspberries, still talks all day long. He’s confused about why he can’t breathe but he’ll be damned if this cold will sap his positive energy. Children fight.
I wish we could all be like innocent children. Before the world singes us with its poisons and negativity, we were all once hopeful and happy. The common cold, a bad day, nothing changes the true heart of a child. There is hope, belief, happiness and a curiosity that shines brightly. If only it could shine forever.
As a parent our job is to try to keep that hope shining forever. In today’s world many will say thats damn near impossible but that attitude right there is already signaling defeat.
Its amazing how children keep teaching their parents. No matter how young and how unknowing, their simple livelihood teaches adults in greater ways than anything in our world can.
I can’t give much more than extra TLC to my son right now to help him fight his cold but as I watch him fight it, little does he know that he is giving me more than he’ll ever understand.
We could all stand to learn a little something from a child today. I wish we could all learn something everyday.
Don’t you think this world would be better off?
