Stillness
“...I
studied the bird, deeply impressed that she seemed to know
instinctively that in stillness is healing. I had been learning that
too, learning that stillness can be the prayer that transforms us.
How much more concentrated our stillness becomes, though, when it's
shared...”
Sue
Monk Kidd (When the Heart Waits)
One
of the hardest things in the world is waiting until we are certain of
something. Not jumping the gun, not moving quickly to fix it, but
waiting in stillness until the solution comes to us. In my
experience, quick-fixing is almost always the wrong thing to do
unless it's plumbing, or a broken light bulb. I've been known to glue
my fingers together with super-glue. In matters of the human heart,
quick fixes are usually disastrous.
In
my youth, I was a “fixer” person. If there was a problem,
there had to be a quick and easy solution—and buddy, I knew what it
was. You can't imagine how many things I messed up, how many
relationships I put permanently on the skids because my “fixes”
didn't take. How many people I hurt with my quick and dirty solutions
to their problems. Too many to name here.
Watching
my son suffer through the end of his short marriage has been hard for
me. I want to put a band-aid on it. I want to make the pain go away.
It's much harder to sit in stillness and simply be present while he
finds his own solutions. Which he will...in time. I have been where
he is, and I know that life does go on and sometimes much better than
before. But when you're hurting, no one can tell you that.
I
dreamed last night of a man who could fix broken things using
porcelain. I was shown several broken things that he had fixed—a
bowl, a vase, a human face. They had been shattered, and now they
were perfect. I was amazed and kept asking, “How does he do that?”
No one explained; it just was so. I thought of Jesus putting clay on the blind man's eyes.
Human beings break, too. And
healing is found in shared stillness, in waiting with trust for the solution to
come of its own free will.
In
the spirit,
Jane
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