Last week marked a first for our family. With four kids, we’ve had our share of illnesses hit us. Last August, all of us at one point had COVID to various degrees of severity (the kids had what seemed like mild colds compared to Natasha and myself). We’ve dealt with fevers, headaches, growing pains, even the summer of lice (although I will emphatically declare that neither I nor Natasha got it!). What we hadn’t experienced yet was the family stomach virus. Well, we can check that box off.

It started Tuesday night around 8pm. I was getting the older boys to bed. The “youngers” had gone down an hour before. I heard strange noises coming from the bedroom of the two-year-old which quickly morphed into panicked crying. As I entered his room, it wasn’t immediately apparent what was happening, only that something was bothering him. Surely he just lost his pacifier, or his water is gone and he’s being dramatic about it. Then I saw the massive puddle on the bed. Why did we eat pizza that night?

The work, of course, had begun. Clean up the kid. Change the sheets. Spray down the mattress. Redress. Sooth and calm down the baby. Put him back to bed. Then throw everything into the washing machine (actually we might have just thrown the sheets away). Then clean up yourself, wipe your hands, and say, “Done.”

Except it wasn’t done. Not. Even. Close.

An hour later, the two-year-old was at it again. We restarted the routine. Clean the mattress. Change the baby. But this time we’re seeing that maybe we have to shift some expectations around. We get a few more tools together. With this second episode, we’ve exhausted our supply of clean crib sheets, so we’re going to have to get creative. Natasha decides she’s going to stay with him a while longer. By this time it’s nearly 11pm. We formulate a plan. She’ll stay with the little one for a couple hours, anticipating future episodes to come. I try to get some sleep so I can get up early with the older boys and get them ready for school.

Well, if God has a wonderful plan for your life, that wasn’t it. My head had been on the pillow for no more than a few minutes when my ten-year-old enters the room and informs me that the nine-year-old has decided to join the fun. And boy did he have fun. All over his bed. Why did we eat pizza that night?

For a nine-year-old with a stomach virus, the routine is the same but expanded. They don’t sleep on plastic mattresses. They sleep on thick, cottony clouds with absorption powers so great it would make the Brawny man impressed. He’s definitely not sleeping on that bed tonight. In fact, by the time I’ve finished cleaning up the bed and by the time he’s finished showering off (yes, it was quite bad), he’s already onto episode two.

Meanwhile, Natasha has been dealing with episode three with the two-year-old (or was it episode four?). The old adage that once you have three kids, you switch your tactics from man-to-man to zone could not be more true. She had her zone. I had mine. They both collided frequently at the bathroom.

It was determined upon parental counsel that the nine-year-old should sleep on the floor right outside the bathroom. He assented to this without protest. This was based on in-the-field data that was being gathered in real time. Natasha developed a new plan for the two-year-old, and I could see how the night was going to go down, which did not include me getting back into my own bed. I grabbed my sleeping bag and camped out in the hall with the nine-year-old. Provisions were made. Sheets laid down next to the bed along with a receptacle for quick access.

All this time, the ten-year-old has been sitting in his bed, watching the show play out. Upon frequent check-ups on how he was feeling, his repeated answer was, “I feel fine.”

Following the nine-year-old’s third episode, made much easier to manage by his close proximity to the bathroom, he and I both settled in on the floor to get a few minutes of sleep until episode four came on. Meanwhile, Natasha had finally settled the two-year-old into his sheet-less crib with the hopes that perhaps his show had been dropped after a four-episode run. It was now after 1am.

It’s a strange thing to be simultaneously exhausted and on high alert at the same time. That’s how I felt when the faintest of sounds crept out from the bedroom. Just the sound of a slight cough. It’s the ten-year-old clearing his throat. Repeatedly. In a rhythmic manner. Nope. The ten-year-old had his own show now. Luckily there had been foresight enough among the two sleep-deprived parents to set him up with his own specialized receptacle and thus avoiding the cleanup process incurred by the other two.

So by 2am, all three boys were starring in their own shows on their own schedules. Sometimes, episodes were spaced out. There were a few times, though, that all three aired episodes at the same time. The shows lasted until well past 6am when I think my head finally hit the pillow and I was able to enter into a deep sleep. I would later come to find out that the ten-year-old had decided to play one more episode during that time that I completely slept through as I lay in my sleeping bag in the hallway outside his door. He proceeded to then go wake his mother up leaving me passed out until I finally awoke some time after 10am. I believe he reported that he tried to wake me to no avail. To this day, I deny this ever happened.

Natasha and I would have our own shows later on in the week. Fortunately, she never aired an episode, but seemed to threaten to over the next few days. I, on the other hand, had reached the end of the week and thought just maybe I was in the clear. I had been elbow-deep in a highly infectious virus and had seemed to escape without falling prey to the little buggers myself. It was not meant to be. Saturday morning I woke up with a strange feeling in my stomach which would eventually mature into my own show throughout the day and into the evening. I felt like a soldier getting into the last helicopter out of Vietnam only to be shot down before reaching safe air space. I almost made it.

I have to admit that even in the midst of the sleep-deprived night, there was humor in what happened. Natasha and I couldn’t help but laugh. Sometimes that’s the only thing you can do. There’s also nothing incredibly spiritual to take away from this. This is life. It happens. And when it does and you’re the parent, you do what we do and you stay up with the kids, clean up after them, and try to catch some z’s when you can.

But now that I’m about a week removed from everything, there’s a couple of instructive lessons I notice that are at least moderately carry over into everyday life. The first I mentioned already—these things happen. Life is messy sometimes. We go through seasons of plenty and seasons of want. Things can be going well and then suddenly something messy happens. The worst thing you can say is, “I never expected it.” You don’t have to always live like a disaster will happen tomorrow, but you don’t want to live like it couldn’t. Peter told his readers in 1 Peter 4:12, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” Now, the fiery trial he’s talking about here is not a family session of a stomach virus. He’s talking about persecution. But the principle of the lesser to the greater still applies. If you’re a parent, a week of dealing with a stomach virus is par for the course. It’s inevitable. So don’t be surprised when it happens. And if you’re a Christian, then persecution is par for the course. Sure, it will look different depending on your context. Some suffer worse persecution than others. But no Christian can live authentically and faithfully in this world while avoiding persecution. So don’t be surprised.

It goes beyond persecution, though. It’s everything that could happen in this life. You can’t have kids and not expect sickness to go around. You can’t live in the midwest and assume you’ll never have to shelter from a tornado. To assume otherwise would be utter foolishness. Instead, you have a mindset that resolves to live in freedom not fear while recognizing that tomorrow anything could happen.

The second lesson that came out of the week was the importance of forward planning. This I put all on my wife. She had the foresight to stock up ages ago on absorbable pads and throw-up bags and tools we could use in a pinch to have quick response time for when a child did get sick. Sure, it wouldn’t have helped us avoid the sickness. But when everything started happening, we had the tools in place to deal with the rest of the night. If we spiritualize that a little bit, I’m not sure many Christians have thought past today. Sure, they know what they want to spend their money on next year. They know what they want to do this summer when the weather is nice. But there’s little forethought into making spiritual preparations to deal with the what-if’s of life.

Really, what we’re talking about is basic discipleship. It’s the spiritual disciplines of the Christian life. Things like prayer, Bible study, meditation, service, fellowship. It’s the present investments in spiritual health that prepare you to deal with the unexpected difficulties that come. You can’t repair the house if you don’t have the tools. And often times those repairs come out of nowhere. You may not be able to predict when they will occur, but you can at least predict that at some point they will occur. Solomon told his son, “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (Prov. 4:7). In other words, wisdom is something you plan for. It’s something you pursue. It’s something you desire and pursue and accumulate. And in that process, you show yourself wise. A lot of the proverbs deal with wisdom that a person needs in order to avoid the pains of foolish decisions. Once the decision is made, it’s done. You have to plan ahead. You have to acquire wisdom before you need it so you have the insight to employ it when the time is right.

If anything, what I’m seeing in all of this is the tension of living in light of the unexpected. You don’t want to be controlled by the future. But you don’t want to be unprepared for it either. Or to put it another way, there’s no question that I’m absolutely relieved that last week is behind us. The kids are back in school. No one is sick anymore. Things seem back to normal. We can all breathe a collective sigh. But I also know we just ordered a new package of barf bags…