Sick In The Hotel Room

I had PTO approved by the grace of God, carved out deliberately so I could give Colin the one thing he wants more than anything else: my undivided time. His love language is quality time, and I have never met anyone who pours quite so much of himself into that single bucket. He is a velcro boy by nature, attached to my side, and it made sense that for the last stretch of his summer vacation he wanted memories, hours, presence, with me.

So I built the trip around him.

A drive up north, activities pitched exactly to his interests. I made the reservations. I checked the weather obsessively. I made sure the car was in good shape, that nothing mechanical would derail us. Every piece was arranged around a version of me operating at full capacity, because the itinerary demanded it.

And then the morning we were to leave, I woke up sick.

A sinus infection or a bad cold, I couldn’t tell which…. only that it had hollowed me out completely. I lay there running the math and the math didn’t work. I was maybe operating at a quarter of my usual energy, and every plan I’d made assumed 100%… without margin.

I remember when Colin was little and this kind of thing happened, I would simply power through. I’d summon the reserves and push forward and refuse to let my body dictate the day. But that was more than a decade ago, and my body no longer negotiates the way it used to. What I could override at 30, I cannot override now. The reserves weren’t there to summon.

And I was destroyed by it.

Not just disappointed….destroyed, out of all proportion to a cancelled itinerary. It took me most of the morning to understand why the reaction was so large, and the understanding actually came from Colin.

Because Colin wasn’t sad. Not remotely.

When I told him we’d have to pivot to quieter things that fit what I could manage, he didn’t flinch.

And into that space, his complete unbotheredness, rushed a voice I recognized from a very long time ago.

When I was a child and got sick on a trip, my parents would lecture me. They would tell me how much money they’d spent, how they couldn’t afford to have me sitting in a hotel room being ill, how my body’s failure was an inconvenience I was imposing on everyone. And if I insisted on resting anyway…. if I couldn’t rally… there were consequences layered on top of the sickness itself. They would buy souvenirs for the trip and deliberately, pointedly, not get one for me. A small thing on paper. Enormous in the interior of a child who learned, in that withholding, that being sick made you unworthy of the gift.

And whats worse is that when I met Colin’s dad, he did the exact same thing to me, cementing that very history. For years.

So there I was, decades later, apologizing to my son. I’m so sorry I’m sick. And then again. And again. Over and over, as if the apology were a debt I had to keep paying down.

And Colin, bewildered, a little exasperated, kept saying, “Mom, it’s fine.” Not through gritted teeth. Not harboring some quiet resentment he was too polite to voice. He genuinely could not understand why I was apologizing at all, let alone why I kept doing it. He found it almost absurd. He was perfectly content to sit and play board games with me. No strings. No hidden ledger. No souvenir being withheld in his small heart as punishment for my body’s betrayal.

I told him, honestly, that this was something I’d just realized I needed to reprogram a script running underneath my life without my permission. And I sat there wrestling with something much larger than a head cold— especially as it wasn’t just my parents that treated me this way, but Colin’s dad did this to me too.

Heres the brass tax: The people who installed that voice in me were not Christians, and they were not repentant.

I never got an apology. I never will. They are who they are, and the door to that kind of reckoning is closed and will stay closed.

Scripture spends a great deal of energy on reconciliation. On the process of confrontation, confession, and restoration between people who have wronged each other. Matthew 18 lays out the steps for when your brother sins against you. But that framework assumes a brother, someone within the covenant community who might listen, repent, be restored. It says far less about the wound inflicted by someone who will never acknowledge it, who feels no guilt, who has no intention of ever making it right.

And yet those wounds are often the deepest, precisely because they can never be resolved through the ordinary channels. You are left holding pieces that the person who broke them will never help you gather. The relationship offers no path to healing because one party has permanently exited the conversation.

David knew this kind of injury. Many of the Psalms are cries about enemies who will not relent, who feel no remorse, whose harm simply is. And what strikes me is that David does not resolve these situations by extracting apologies. He resolves them…. when he resolves them at all….by handing the matter upward. “Repay them according to their work” (Psalm 28:4) is not a prayer that assumes the enemy will ever change. It’s a prayer that releases the debt to God’s jurisdiction rather than holding it in one’s own.

Paul makes this explicit: “Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord'” (Romans 12:19). The Greek gives the sense of making room: stepping back to give space for God to act. This is not a demand that I feel resolved. It’s permission to stop being the one who holds the account. The apology I will never receive is a debt I can hand to the only Judge capable of settling it, which frees me from being its permanent collector.

But releasing the debt is not the same as healing the pattern, and it’s the pattern I’m actually wrestling with.

The child (and young adult) I was built a wall. It was a reasonable wall. Walls usually are at the moment of their construction. If being sick meant being lectured and punished and denied the souvenir, then the wall said: never be a burden, never inconvenience anyone, never let your body’s failure cost the people around you, and if you do, apologize until the debt is paid. That wall protected young me. It managed a genuinely unsafe environment as well as a child could manage it.

The problem is that the wall outlived the danger. Colin is not my parents. Nor his dad. Yet Colin’s unbotheredness was real. And yet the wall was still standing, still operating, still generating apologies for a crime that existed only in a house I left long ago. The defense that once protected me had become the thing distorting my present.

This is the strange cruelty of inherited wounds.

The adaptation that saved you becomes the thing that imprisons you. Proverbs says “a prudent man sees danger and hides himself” (Proverbs 22:3), and that prudence was appropriate then. But there is a corresponding foolishness in hiding from danger that is no longer there– in flinching at a raised hand that will never fall again.

Scripture’s language for transformation keeps returning to the removal of these interior structures. Ezekiel records God’s promise: “I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). The stone heart is not villainy; it’s protection. It’s the organ that hardened in order to survive. And the promise is not that God will help you defend it better but that He will replace it. That the very thing you built to keep yourself safe will be exchanged for something softer, more vulnerable, and paradoxically more alive.

At the center of this is a distortion of what love even is.

The love I learned as a child (and in my relationship with Colin’s dad) was transactional. It kept accounts. Its provision was contingent on my usefulness, my convenience, my not costing too much. Sickness made me a bad investment, and the withheld souvenir was the ledger being balanced against me.

But this is precisely the love that Scripture defines against. “Love is patient and kind… it is not irritable or resentful; it keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Corinthians 13:4–5). The phrase for keeping no record, ou logizetai to kakon , uses an accounting term. Love does not reckon up the wrong, does not maintain the running tally. What I received as a child was love that did nothing but maintain the tally. And so I learned to keep the tally against myself, to be my own accountant of my own burdensomeness, apologizing to preemptively balance a book that Colin wasn’t even keeping.

The most radical thing about Colin’s “it’s fine” was that there was no ledger behind it. He wasn’t absorbing a cost and generously choosing not to charge me for it. He simply didn’t experience my sickness as a cost at all. He wanted to be with me. Drawing together was the thing he wanted. My body’s state didn’t enter into his accounting because he had no accounting.

That is nearer to how God loves than anything my childhood taught me.

“While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). The love arrives while we are weak– not once we’ve recovered, not once we’ve made ourselves useful, not once we’ve stopped being a burden. Weakness is the precondition God’s love operates within, not the disqualification my parents made it. Paul even reports the Lord telling him, “My power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The very state my parents punished is the state in which God says His strength most fully appears.

Which brings me to what I actually want, and what I’m certain God wants for me.

I do not want to spend the rest of my life terrified of being sick. That is a ridiculous way to live, and it’s unrealistic, and it is not what God intends for anyone. Bodies fail. Plans collapse. Energy runs out. To organize my whole interior life around never being a burden is to remain the frightened child managing an environment that no longer exists.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). John names the exact mechanism. My fear was fear of punishment …. the lecture, the withheld gift, the consequence layered on top of the illness. And the antidote is not more vigilance, not a better wall, not more thorough apologizing. It’s love. the kind that casts fear out rather than accommodating it. The fear and the healing cannot occupy the same space; one displaces the other.

But I want to be honest that walls do not come down through a single act of will.

I did not stop apologizing to Colin that morning through sheer decision. I recognized the pattern, named it aloud to him, and that recognition was a first crack in the wall, not its demolition. Sanctification, as Scripture describes it, is rarely instant. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2) .the verb is continuous, ongoing, a renovation rather than a switch. The stone heart is not swapped for flesh in one morning. It is worn down, replaced piece by piece, over years of being loved without a ledger until the ledger finally starts to seem as absurd to me as it already seemed to my son.

I did not want to be sick that morning. I would not have chosen it. But I’ve come to think the collapse of my plans was the only thing that could have surfaced this particular wound, because the wound only reveals itself under exactly those conditions…. when my body fails and someone I love is depending on me and the old voice rises up to tell me I’ve become a burden.

Colin and I played games while I rested, and the weekend was not what I’d planned. It was different… and it was enough, because the thing he wanted was never the itinerary. It was me. Present, even diminished. Beside him, even sick.

Joseph’s line keeps returning to me: “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). My parents meant the lectures and the withheld souvenirs to shape a compliant, un-burdensome child, and in a sense they succeeded…. they shaped exactly that. But God appears to be meaning the same material for good, using a common cold and a ten-year-old’s exasperated “Mom, it’s fine” to begin dismantling what they built. The wound and the healing are being worked from the same wound.

I still have the wall.

I felt it that morning, still standing, still issuing apologies. But for the first time I saw it clearly for what it was. Not a feature of reality, not a true accounting of my worth, but a structure a frightened child built in a house I no longer live in. And seeing the wall is the beginning of its coming down.

Colin, drawing beside me, contentedly unbothered by my failure to be strong, was doing something closer to the work of God than he could possibly know…. loving me without a ledger, and in doing so, showing me the ledger was never real.