When Times are Tough

No matter how tough life may seem sometimes,  

you have to remember that there is always someone  

out there in the world that has it a lot worse than you.

The evening of that Saturday when I took my newborn daughter to the hospital and learned that she had catastrophic congenital heart defects, I was sitting in the lounge area outside the neo-natal ICU [NICU]. We had just been told that our child would not live to see the morning, and I was hunched in a corner trying desperately to absorb it all.  

Just then I heard the sound of childish laughter, and the most beautiful little boy - around four years old - came around the corner pulling an IV poll and laughing with his parents.  I overheard the mother say that the child was "well" and would be discharged the following morning.  I was struck with the rawest form of pure jealousy:  her child would live and go home; my child would die and be buried.  It was almost more than I could bear to sit and listen to his childish pratter and his happy parents' answers.  A few minutes later, I went into the nearby waiting room to bed down for the night.

At 6:00 a.m. the next morning, I arose with a faint whisper of hope in my heart.  No one had come to get us during the night.  My daughter was obviously still alive. As I entered the NICU, I noticed that the curtains of my daughter's room were open - I could see her little bed from the doorway.  The room next to hers, however, which had been empty when we went to bed, had the curtains drawn and the door shut.  Emanating from that room were the primal cries of a mother wracked with unbearable grief.  All of the nurses at the desk were crying.  As I stood rooted to the spot, the door opened and the couple from the night before emerged with the NICU director.  That precious little boy had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during the middle of the night, and died before anyone could even move.

I have never forgotten the lessons of that awful day.  There are times when life bears down hard on all of us.  We feel like we are the only one going through the dark shadows - that life is unfair and defined only by pain.  But no matter how excruciating our circumstances, there is someone - probably close by - who has it much worse than we do.  Our peace and our sanity lie in turning over the pain and the fear to the One who can bear it with us and for us.  He is our refuge and our strength.

You are my hiding place,

You always fill my heart with songs of deliverance,

Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You.

I will trust in You.

Let the weak say, "I am strong in the strength

of the Lord; I will trust in You."