A SICK child is so altogether different from a sick adult.
In Holy Scripture also this is evident with the sick children, of which we are told, with the sick little boy of David and the sick little daughter of Jairus; and even more still, with the little boy of the Shunammite in the days of Elisha.
That little boy may have been six or seven years old, for he had gone out from home alone to the land, where his father was at work; and yet he cannot have been much older, for his mother held him for hours on her knees.
This little boy had gone in the morning to the field where father and the men were reaping. The walk had evidently been too much for him. It had brought on a great, serious congestion. His little head began to pain him sorely; and when he came to his father, his first cry was: “O, father, my head, my head!” (II Kings 4, 20).
Yet the father saw nothing serious in it. At least he went on with his work, and had the boy carried home by a servant, to his mother.
A sick child, he rightly felt, belongs with mother. But already on the way the trouble increased. The unsteady motion occasioned by being carried, added to the increasing heat, seems to have aggravated the congestion. And when he finally came to his mother, the Shunammite took him on her lap and put his head, that pained him so, against her breast. And so he remained, without help or counsel, until noon; and later in the afternoon the boy probably had a convulsion, and in that convulsion he died.
And only then she took the yet warm little corpse from her lap, and laid her little child on the bed in the prophet’s chamber of Elisha.
IN such a child already that quiet, willing, almost silent suffering affects one so tragically.
That crying: “My head, my head!” is all the sound he made, and quietly he lets himself be carried away; feels the pain less, so he might but rest on mother’s lap, and without another groan, he dies.
When sickness comes, we older people are generally too wise; we know too much of everything; are too busy with ourselves; and thereby make ourselves uneasy.
But a small, sick child lies down speechless and suffers; sometimes with a painful expression on the face, to be sure, but yet mostly as a background of that painful expression with charming childlike features.
To be a doctor of children therefore is something altogether different from being a doctor of grown people. Adults tell all sorts of things, what they have felt and experienced. They can answer every sort of question you may put. And afterward they can inform you about the several things, regarding which you gave them direction. But with a child this is not so.
A children’s doctor can look at the suffering child, feel his pulse, observe a few phenomena and try to guess something from the as yet little expressive features of the face, but that is all. All the rest must go upon intuition.
For, and this is the pathetic part of it, even when he is very sick, a child scarcely knows of his sickness. He has no thought about it. Passively he lets sickness come upon him. He feels indeed, that something strange is happening to him, but knows not what. All therefore you hear of a sick child is mostly a troubled exclamation of pain, as is told of the child of the Shunammite.
BUT for this very reason with a sick child belongs his mother. And it is a witness against the motherheart, when in such trying moments some one else understands better than the mother the sacred art, of ameliorating the suffering of that dear, suffering child and take away the trouble.
The mother is with the sick child the of God appointed nurse. Not that there are no others, oftentimes an older sister, able with great devotion to take care of the sick child; but because, especially in days of pain and sickness, there operates a mystery between a young child and the mother.
Also after the mother brought her little one into the world, there continues to operate a certain secret relation between her and the fruit of her womb. A relation, which is strongly felt at first, because she feeds the little one with her own milk. But which also still continues with the weaned child, and, as a rule, only begins to diminish when the child goes to school.
And that magnetic tie, if we may say so, which the mother feels binding her to her young child and the young child to his mother, operates at once so much more strongly, when the little one begins to suffer and becomes so ill, that he must die.
Then that mother comforts that little child, even though she does nothing else than sit quietly by his side. Then that intuitively appropriated motherlove imparts rest to the suffering child. It quiets his pain. And if he must die, it eases the death struggle.
AND, by the very working of that mysterious power the sick-bed of a child as a rule is so much more beautiful than the sick-bed of an adult.
Of course there are exceptions. Sometimes you find a crib with a very fretful child, which is troublesome and naughty; and over against this a bed, on which a pious child of God has waited more than fifty years for his Lord and Savior in holy peace.
But these are exceptions, and, as a rule, the sick-bed of our little ones is so much richer, so long as you but understand the art, of reading in that quiet and silent suffering what expresses itself therein.
With a young child there is no struggling against what God brings upon him. Just because a young child knows so much less, he makes so much easier a surrender of himself.
Also a little child lives for the most part in that naïve faith, which indeed without more is not saving, but yet comes so much nearer to the piety of the Sermon on the Mount, than much wisdom, which we older ones have to narrate.
When Jesus speaks of not being careful for the morrow, but to live like the birds and the flowers, that live from God’s hand and are so gloriously cared for by God, does not such a sick child seem, far more than the sick of later years, like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, of which Jesus preached so touchingly and with such emphasis?
Yea, when you see Jesus take a little child and place it in the midst of strong, big men, that were His disciples, and then hear Him say, that they must become as such a little child, does it not then for us elders also apply to the sick-bed, that our sick-bed is God-glorifying only, when upon our sick-bed also we have become as the sick child on mother’s lap?
A child that is sick, does not lose himself in his sickness.
Call to mind for a moment, that a sick child, as soon as he has a moment of relief, is at once inclined again to play, or to listen to an interesting story, and resume again his dear little face as of old.
A child has no knowledge yet of melancholy. He does not concentrate all his thinking and deliberating upon his sickness. He does not demur nor complain; neither is he so fretful as sick folks of years frequently are.
And, naturally, this is easy for a child, for his world is still small, he has nothing to care for yet, he does not look upon life so inquisitively and surmisingly, and has never yet had any thought about the mystery of suffering.
But by reason of this there is alive on the bottom of the childheart a quieter and richer confidence in his Father Who is in the heavens. He is not plagued as yet by much reasoning, and therefore lives more in concrete representations, just as the Bible continuously tries to impress it upon us elders. Representations of a Fatherhouse above, and a God Who lives there, and looks down upon us, and thinks of us, and lets His angels keep invisible watch, and in case we die, awaits us above.
And however childlike-naïve all this may live in the imagination of that dear, suffering child, might not that youthful little soul therefore often be nearer to the truth and the reality, than the reverie and murmuring of those aged of days, who reason, O, so wisely, about their sickness and about their dying?
With such a young child it always is, as though on the background you observe the presence of God and His angels, while of this sacred loveliness so frequently with the aged of days you find nothing.
MANY have no eye for this, and therefore learn nothing from such a sick-bed of a child; any more than they ever learn to understand of the quiet preachment, that comes to them from the world of children.
Yet a Christian may not do so.
For this our Savior has pointed us far too frequently to the child life and to the child world: not merely that we should carry on our heart the training of these little ones, but also that we should let ourselves be trained by them.
He who does not love children, has herein a witness against his heart, and we add thereto against his faith. Yea, we would almost doubt whether one can stand as child right before God, if he has not first learned from little children what it is to be a child.
But though it is true, what we by no means deny, that by much troublesomeness and all sorts of naughtinesses, as in the fullness of life they run and romp, children frequently repel, in sickness this becomes so altogether different.
Then that sinfulness in our childen for so large a part falls away. Then something so sacred draws about them.
And therefore the little child, especially upon the sick-bed, is to us so glorious a witness to what, in distress and death, by a childlike faith, can also be our part.
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