Growing Pains

Yesterday I gave some practical tips on teething. Even if you have never had a teething infant you can imagine that it would be very painful. A sharp object pushing it’s way through the gums in your mouth, the gums swelling and sore to the touch. Worse than a splinter, and not even able to dig it out. It has to come through in it’s own timing.

In the last few days Anna has had a runny nose, and even woke up in the middle of the night crying because she can not breathe and suck her binky at the same time. So I have had to suck out her nose, and I am wiping it constantly. Everytime I do she cries, and screams. I know she would love to punch me if she could. I pick her up when I am done and love her, explaining that “I know it hurts but it is only because mommy loves you that I do it”. See I know what she doesn’t, that if I don’t let it hurt a little bit now, it is going to hurt worse later. When it gets in her lungs and she has pneumonia, or maybe just that she will feel bad longer than necessary.
Or when she has to have shots and she looks at me like “how could you?”, she does not understand that it is because I love her that I allow her, and even subject her, to suffer this pain.

Then I felt like I had a “God-moment”. You know when something you have been mulling over and not able to grasp or understand suddenly is explained in the simplest of terms. Here I am explaining to Anna that I love her so much, and that is the only reason I am doing this, because I can see how the pain now is better than the pain later. I know that even though in her mind she doesn’t understand, and is asking why would you let me go through this, that it is going to help her grow healthier and stronger than if I did not allow her to go through it. And then God says, “hello? Anyone Home?”
Are you getting where I am going with this yet? Do you have pain in your life, a “cutting tooth” (Growing Pain) or maybe you’re physically going through something and wonder “God how could you let me go through this?”. I believe God doesn’t put stuff on us, he does not make you sick, he doesn’t cause marital problems, he does not cause your children to drive you crazy. But he may be allowing you to go through something for a greater purpose! Maybe, just maybe, he is going to show you your weakness through this. Where do you need to grow? What weakness or area of needed growth is He showing you through this circumstance?

You know the sooner we go to the doctor when we are sick, the sooner we receive treatment, the sooner we feel better. When I had strep throat it took one day for me to call the doctor because I knew how painful it was, and that I was not going to get better until I received treatment. Want to know something else? Even after I did start taking the medicine I still had to wait 24 hours before I felt any relief. And it was still 3 or 4 days before I was completely healed. Just remember, sometimes it takes time to get the healing. But why do we wait until we are at deaths door before we go to God for help?

Our Father loves us so much! And even though in our infant minds we don’t understand why we are feeling pain, we may find out down the road it was because the tooth just needed to break through and now we can have solids instead of just milk. Now we are able to have variety and be introduced to so many other things we were never aware of before. Things we would have never known without the pain. Or maybe we are sick, and God is having to hold us down to give us medicine, because we do not understand that ultimately that nasty tasting stuff is going to make me feel better. In our childish minds we did not relate the pain of taking that medication to the relief of the much worse pain.

I hope this helped you as much as it did me!