The middle place

Ok, so, the story continues. The whole chaplaincy experience has transformed my reality. My struggle is with my own family, my own kids, now with an up close personal look at sickness and suffering of children. I am vascillating between hypervigilance and "suck it up, you are so beyond fine". I can't help but relate to parents when I meet them in the hospital rooms. When I see the pained look in their eyes. When I see how much they want to hope that this is just a bump in the road and that soon all will return to normal. For some it will, for others there is a new kind of normal. I can't help but see my own children laying in those beds, sick, in pain, scared.
Other times at home with my own kids after being at the hospital all day, complaints of sniffles and about what we are eating for dinner exacerbate me. Don't they know how healthy they are? Don't they realize how blessed they are to be eating food with a fork instead of being fed through a tube, sitting at a table instead of laying in a bed, walking and running and feeling the wind on their skin instead of confined to one room or one building?
This is my struggle. I am trying to find the middle place. That is where these two realities intertwine and mesh, where one makes the other more real.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, forty days, excluding Sundays, between now and Easter. Jesus spent 40 days in the desert before he was tempted by Satan. Did this time in the desert, this time of self denial and solitude make Jesus more real? More human? Does suffering make us human? Jesus himself was the intertwining of God and man, fully God, fully human, Jesus is the middle place.