I am convinced that there is nothing
whinier than a 13 year old boy with an ear ache. Well, except maybe an 11 year old boy with a messed up
wrist or maybe another 11 year old boy with a fever. Today the boys cottage at work was sick. I mean every last one of them had some sort
of ailment. And oh how they whine. At one point I was walking outside and I had
one boy on my left explaining where his wrist hurt, one boy on my right trying to convince me that he had lost a
piece of tissue inside his ear, and one boy behind me begging for cough
drops. It never stopped. And as I would turn my attention to one,
another would suddenly get worse. If I
was talking about ear drops suddenly the boy with the hurt wrist couldn’t
even walk he was in so much pain. If I
turned my attention to him the boy with the cold couldn’t eat anything because it
hurt to swallow. My boys were physically
falling to pieces. And I literally
thought I was going to lose my mind and I was only watching them for an hour or
two.
My natural response in that
situation is to tell them to suck it up and quit whining. After all, they’re boys and its time that
they start learning to deal with some things.
People always say if you baby them they’ll keep finding ways to get your
attention and I’ve developed quite the reputation for babying the kids as it
is. So my first response was to just not
give them attention. Yes, they were sick
but none of them were as bad as they were making it out to be. The fever was gone, the ear ache was being
medicated, and the colds were really just allergies. So I thought about being the tough guy today
and finally cracking down on some of this whining.
And then I remember how I feel when
I’m sick. I’m 25 years old and if I’m
sick I still call my momma. I don’t
expect her to drive down here and bring me medicine and I know there is
absolutely nothing she can do for me two hours away, but I still call my
momma. I call her because she cares. I
call her because I know she’ll worry and I know she’ll genuinely want me to
feel better. I call her because somehow
it makes me feel better to know that my momma knows I’m sick.
The kids at work can’t call their
mommas. Some of them can never call
their mommas again. So today, while I in
no way am trying to be their mother, I was reminded that they needed me to
care. They needed all of us as staff to
care and to worry. They wanted us to make them take their medicine, bring them
sprite, check on them when they’re laying their heads down during lunch, feel
their foreheads just in case, and worry.
They needed to know that we cared that they did not feel good.
It reminds me of the verse where
Jesus wept in John 11. He came to Martha
and Mary after Lazarus had died. He knew
He was going to raise him back to life and He knew their sadness was going to
be gone soon but He also knew in that moment they needed Him. Jesus wept because He cared and He loved them
exactly where they were. Jesus wept because
of their hurts and their pains. So I learned a valuable lesson today. Sometimes the hurts and pains that I think
are so trivial and will be over and done with in a day are monumental for that
person on that day. I have to learn to
love like Jesus loves and see through the circumstance and into the heart of a
person and LOVE them where they are.
So, for today, I babied some sick, whiny, snot nosed boys.
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