Band-Aid

I cut my thumb pretty badly last Tuesday night while I was working on some stained glass. No stitches though — thank God.

There's a band-aid covering the tip of my very sensitive left thumb.

It's going to get better, just not on my timetable.

I want to point pull back the band-aid and check to see if my thumb has healed.

I know it hasn't. And yet, I still want to check.

I know that my body — a most glorious, self-righting organism — will heal itself after a week, or two, or three.

But I still want to check now.


I think life is like that.

There are some things in life that just can't happen any sooner than they can happen. And while we know this, we obsessively check on them anyway.

Sadly, we often lose patience with ourselves for failing to be just slightly ahead of where we actually are.

Here’s my example, I'm not up for running weekend retreats. I know that. Nonetheless, I constantly berate myself for not already holding them. The simple truth? It will happen, but it's just not the right time yet. I would be better served being patient and kind to myself.

Why don’t we turn this into a practical spiritual exercise?

I encourage you to put a band-aid on your finger and let it remind you to wait patiently for your life to unfold.

And finally, since it’s one of my favorites and quite appropriate given the circumstances, here again is a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke:

I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.