Norah's teething and we're sleepy...

Do You Have Eyes?

Whoa… we’ve had some tough nights lately! Our seven-month-old Norah is teething… bad! She is usually the kind of baby that just sits around cooing until someone looks at her, at which point she smiles like crazy. She is always so happy and full of giggling energy… or at least, she was like that. For the past few days she has been taking terrible naps, screaming a ton and not eating, which leads to more bad naps, tons more screaming and less eating which leads to… well, I guess you get the point.

So, the other night Christy and I were up with Norah way after midnight trying to figure out a way to get her to calm down enough to go to sleep, and I was getting pretty frustrated as each little baby screech brought my alarm clock closer and closer to the present. Then it happened... my sweet wife (who by the way had not yet freaked out, even though I was shaking and twitching like a crack-addict) said something which changed the whole situation for me… She said, “Can you imagine trying to go to bed with a toothache?” I stopped my own whining long enough to think about it and realized that I have never really had a toothache. I don’t even know what that feels like. I can’t remember my own bouts of teething, but I’ve never really had a tooth go bad. I know from Looney Tunes that it looks pretty painful, but I don’t really know what it feels like. Norah was experiencing all kinds of pain that I knew absolutely nothing about…

I have been reading the book of Job lately and boy, I’ll tell you what, that is one frustrated brother! Of course, he did lose all his property, wealth, livestock and children in one really crappy day (you just know it was a Monday). And in defending himself, Job complained to God… a lot. In chapters nine and ten he starts to form an argument against God that basically goes like this… “I haven’t done anything wrong, and if I have, show me what it is. You sit up there picking on me and I guess you think it’s easy to live life down here, but you know what, you don’t know what it’s like! You have limitless power and resources… you don’t know what it is to be weak and tempted. You’ve never been a human and you don’t know how hard it is for us.” In Job 10:4 he says, “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees?”

The amazing thing about our God is that he answered Job… and all the rest of us. God’s answer was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger in a little suburb of Jerusalem called Bethlehem. When Jesus was born, God had eyes, just like us. God became a human baby to identify with all our weakness, endure all of our temptation, (only without sin) and then bear all of our wrong in His own death. God had to go through sleepless nights of pain and crying because He was teething. My Jesus knows how Norah feels because He has been there. He actually became one of us and He knows what it’s like down here.