I broke my arm. The first day in December, a Sunday – luckily, for me – a minister – it was after church.  I was in a hurry, reaching for something on an upper shelf in my closet, on my tip toes.  I had just boosted myself a little and was coming back down, stepped back onto something that shouldn’t have been there that wobbled, lost my balance, fell, and whack – hit my wrist/arm as i went down.  Both bones broken – no surgery – but a cast for 4-6 weeks.

The first week with pain meds wasn’t so bad, it still hurt, but you would expect that.  But I’ve got things to do!  This is so much more than just having my arm in a cast.  It is stopping and sitting down so that I can elevate my arm from time to time.  It is coordinating my schedule with Kristin because I need her help to shower and get dressed which also means we need more time in the morning.  It means not being able to open the jar of peanut butter for myself.

At first I tried to use speech recognition on my computer to type – its hard to type with just one hand!  But the microphone tries to interpret the road noise outside and the dog snoring in addition to my voice and comes up with really weird text.  So I gave up on that.  Then I tried using my left hand for just a few letters.  I keep trying to use my hand now and again just for a little more independence, to speed things up – and then it just hurts later.

Why is it so hard to slow down? Why is it so hard to wait for someone to help?  It’s Advent – the season when we talk incessantly about waiting and about slowing down. I have laughed at myself more than once (in a very kind way).  Perhaps its because I have my own plans, my own vision of how I want things to be and I’m sure I’m the only one who can make them happen.

At first slowing down meant plopping down in front of HGTV or “What not to wear” or something like that.  Until boredom set in.  Or God’s Spirit finally got through to me.

Boredom and the Spirit got me to turn the TV off, then the question nagged … why is this so hard?  Why is slowing down so hard?  I don’t have an answer to the question, but I am spending time with it instead of the TV.  At the end of the Christmas story we hear that Mary pondered all these things in her heart.  So often, we are going so fast, doing so much, or simply so distracted with TV, the news and video games, that we don’t have time or don’t take time to ponder things in our heart.  It’s hard, really hard – and it hurts.  But it’s the only way to heal.

Peace to you, Christine