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dirty fingers

 

Reflections on my wife’s journey with MS.

Harder than picking up a wheelchair and placing it in the back of your car
is picking up your wife and gently lowering her into it.
That gesture can moisten your eyes, and dry up your soul at the same time.
A week earlier we would have walked here to shop,
and now I come alone with my thoughts and leave her alone with hers.
I look out my window at a world passing by at 40 kms an hour,
And her chair looks out a window at a world that seems to have stopped.
I am not praying for an unusual miracle, one that leaves it’s witnesses astounded.
Instead I am praying for the ordinary miracle
her body doing what it was designed to do-heal itself.
One of the many ordinary miracles we take for granted.
But we like our God in the burning bushes and the parting seas,
But God was in the bush before it was lit afire,
and can still be seen in it’s charred remains.
God was in the water before it was cut in two and remains reflected when it’s waves are reunited.

While there are many places I can’t find God, even though I search,
I refuse to believe he’s not here, he must be just beyond my vision.
So I stopped looking for him in the impersonal test results and MRI’s.
Because he is in the coloured scrubs
and tired eyes of his Angels working their 12 hour shifts.
The emergency room is full off charred bushes, and anxious seas beyond my understanding. Some arrive already aflame, and divided not fully aware that for them everything is about to change. And for many, that change is good,
it’s going to save their lives.

I am being saved through this suffering.
Saved from pat answers, and superstitious cliche’s.
Saved from taking for granted the miracle of kindness and the beauty of humility.
When Jesus came to visit today, he was a red headed woman in scrubs.
I am not the burning bush I once was,
but I am learning how to draw a heart with my blackened charcoal fingers.
How is it that charcoal can dirty my hands but purify my water?
How is it that it can mark my life yet clean my heart?

I want to find God in the ordinary, so I can see him in everything.
And when i’m looking at the door waiting for his grand entrance,
I want to remember that he might already be in this room cleaning the commode.
If you can find him in the pain and suffering,
then you’ll never be alone.

 

 

 

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