Quick Fix

Last night we received some bad news; my father-in-law needs to have surgery again. He had surgery at the beginning of February and it has not healed and the mesh they used to seal his wound is infected so they need to replace it. The surgery is not that complicated but his health is. He has a tendency to get blood clots after he has surgery which can be very deadly. He has survived 2, which is a miracle and we don’t want to test it again. Kathy called me at work and I came directly home. I could have told her to “trust the Lord”, “have faith”, “God is the Great Physician”, or “God has a purpose” but that is not what was needed. She needed my shoulder; she needed my ear; she needed my arms to hold her. It is always easy to offer up a cliché and brush off a problem as fixed and in our fast paced society, a quick fix, a band-aid is what we feel is the optimal solution. We have so many crusty, dirty, torn band-aids on burdens that we have band-aids to hold band-aids on. Sometimes, the best kind of healing is exposure, to air it out. Last night, I didn’t “fix” the problem, I simply let Kathy it air out.