A trusting heart

Intense grief is borne of intense love.  And I’m supposed to be trying to move forward, but I’ve loved too intensely to feel like I can make any such progress on my own.  Hell, I don’t want to move forward.  Thank goodness for friends who plant seeds like “you need to move on” – I wonder, often, if that’s God.

Jesus asked so often: “What do you want Me to do for you?”  He wants to know what I want…and this is a small comfort.  He cares about what I want – even, perhaps, if it is different from what I need.  He cares.  And maybe, just maybe, this is an avenue to trusting Him.  As much as I long for this friendship back, for everything to go back to the way it was, I long perhaps more for a trusting heart.  So I go to bed tonight with Ps 37^4-5 on my mind: “Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart.  Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in him, and He will do it.”

Two points for Him!

When I was younger, summer days at my house meant doing “productive”, educational things: reading vocabulary-building books, piano practice, a few pages of journaling each day.  As much as I whined about “never having time to relax”, I’m thankful now that my mother was as adamant as she was about these things…because years later, I’m a logophile and a songwriter, and it’s largely because my mum planted those seeds and was wonderfully stubborn about watering them.

Since my brother started school, summer days mean teaching him to do the same “productive”, educational things.  Thankfully, he loves to read.  And since I’ve only been home a few days, piano lessons will have to wait until I find and go through the books I started with.  However, the discipline required to sit still long enough to write a full page eludes him.  He’s not crazy about writing.

As much as I’ve always adored this little boy, I used to have a short fuse with him, especially when I didn’t understand him.  Case in point: I love to write.  Writing is a large part of how I understand my world.  How could anyone not love to write?  How could my perfect brother not love to write?  (And the real questions, lurking beneath it all: how could my brother not be perfect?  Am I doing something wrong?)

Over the past few months, one close friend has been setting me a wonderful example of how to care for small children, especially when they try her patience and threaten to wear her out.  This lesson was never one that I consciously watched for, but I realized that I’d absorbed it when I got home a few days ago and suddenly had an unreal amount of patience with my brother.  I’m quicker to gently admonish than I am to raise my voice.  I give more encouragement than ultimatums.  My brain has finally seemed to understand that he’s eight – that he’s going to fidget at the table and need more encouragement than I may think is necessary and push the onions aside, because that’s the way eight-year-olds are.  Most importantly, my heart has wrapped itself around the fact that he’s not perfect, and it’s wrong of me to expect such a thing.  Come to think of it, his sister is just as imperfect, and that’s because only God is perfect, and neither of us comes anywhere near that standard.  This is all Him – more specifically, “a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (v. 24).  He planted the seed (my friend and her example), He gave me an increased measure of patience, and He is showing me how He works in my life.  He’s using so many tools to teach me about His grace, and it’s awesome!

I’m reminded now of something I prayed for just two weeks ago: that I would learn to love my brother “right now, to love him more, to love him exactly as [God] loves him”, and a continual prayer: that God would answer me in ways that I can see and understand.  Two points for Him ;)

God shows up

It's important, especially in the midst of sorrow and trial, to remember the good things, too.

I just finished listening to a presentation on the history of physician involvement in prison torture.  I won't...can't...say much else except that there were visuals.  Which is why I'm grateful to God for what happened next:

I went upstairs and grabbed a table so that I could try to "emerge", so to speak...and had barely been sitting here for five minutes when another student approached me on his way out for lunch.  TP is a retired family medicine practitioner, silver-haired but still remarkably sharp, and I've found over the past week that he has contributed much to discussions simply by virtue of his extensive life experience.  I haven't spent much time actually talking to him.  But today, he gave me a bit of a shocker when he just walked up to me and said:

"So when you eventually become a doctor, just remember the old guy who was in a class with you once...because I'll be one of your patients pretty soon."  At this, I began to stammer in my self-deprecating way, whereupon he cut me off and continued: "I have to say that I'm really impressed with you - the way you answer questions, the compassion in your heart, your kindness toward everyone you meet."  "But you've only known me for a week!" I exclaimed.  His reply: "But I can tell already...and I can't wait to be your patient."

Wow.