Essential TReatment, not to be Rushed

January 10, 2023

Beloved:
          This morning I’ve been thinking about carrying on when my body and my spirit would much prefer to pull up the covers and go back to sleep:  to sleep and sleep and sleep.  And some days, sleep is the best choice.  But every day I get up, make my bed, drink coffee, write in my journal and walk the dog.  I feel better for it.  The grief, fear and depression are not gone, but they feel manageable, lighter.  I am a little clearer and more able to face the day.  It sets the day up as one in which I am still alive and have a future.
          The future – as in, five minutes from now and every minute after that –  that speck of time in which I expect to be healed, not all at once like I would prefer, but cell by cell, body and soul.  Not surgically either.  Pharmaceuticals are helpful, but the treatment consists mostly of time and enormous doses of patience, intentional patience, patience that knows time is the most essential treatment and time cannot be rushed.
          Because I can write about it doesn’t make me good at it.  I could also write about how bitterness and resentment keep me up at night and hound me through the day.  I’d trade patience for a pill in a heartbeat, if such pills existed.  I’d trade away months of my life to skip these months of one-cell-at-a-time healing days.  But this is where I am, where I know so many others also are – in the midst of healing so slow it feels we might be moving backwards.  And since time always goes forward, we are carrying on whether we feel like it or not.  And therein is grace, I think, that time keeps pulling us forward.  No matter how we feel in any given moment, time is pulling us through one moment into the next.  But by God’s grace, we are carrying on!
          I’m getting the message now that it’s time to walk the dog.  So let us move into this day with whatever peace we can muster, trusting God to carry us along.  

~ peace & prayers, 
pastor annette

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