A Sick Generation.

This week, as I was suffering from what I thought was food poisoning (turns out it was only a nasty virus...so yay, I can eat sushi again!) and violently upchucking into my toilet, I had a memory of someone I dearly love.

My mother.

You wouldn't think love and upchucking would be halfway comparable, but it dawned on me as all the contents of my stomach (and what often felt like my very soul) were swirling down that porcelain bowl: my mother loves me very much.

How do I know this? Well, it doesn't hurt that for most of the time my head has been stuck nearly inches away from fetid water, my mother has been right there by my side, patting my back and creating a makeshift ponytail as I have willingly asked the heavens to take me, take me now.

(That honor has now been bestowed upon my husband, who rocks it like a champ, I might add. Your makeshift ponytail is killer, Matthew. No cap.).

My mother was my nurse growing up (not to mention my chauffeur, personal chef, wardrobe stylist...you get the picture), well-versed in giving tepid baths to an overheated toddler and rubbing her down with alcohol to keep the fever in check (which I recently Googled only to discover this actually makes the fever worse but who has the time to throw open an Encyclopedia Brittanica when you're caring for an erupting two-year-old circa 1987?).

I know I'm blessed that way. Not everyone has a mother or a mother willing to do what God created a mother to do–to love, even when it involves smelly toilets and projectile vomiting. But I did (and still do), and it taught me the very nature of our Lord who loves us. He's not afraid of the gritty details of our lives when our bodies weaken, and no matter who we are, how much money we've made, how much "power" we think we have, we're all stricken by the great equalizer one way or another and will suddenly come face-to-face with everything we're not while hovering over our own sickness.

He's the one yearning to comfort our sick generation–a whole lot of whom would rather swallow our own vomit than suffer an act of submission so complete, so vulnerable, it flies in the face of the pride we seem to thrive on.

But how fortunate for those of us who get to just let go, stare down the face of an unknown future knowing all along it will be all right because He's there. He'll never leave.

Because He loves us.