Tomorrow is Sunday and tomorrow evening I am going for a run. This will be my first run in about three weeks. I had cut down the running to once a week for a variety of reasons, and then I went and injured myself – like a fool. Two weeks ago I was walking home from church with the husband when I tripped up a curb and fell over. I wasn’t majorly hurt, I was shook up, but the Graze on my leg was humongous and painful. 

You forget how painful grazes can be. Of course you can’t just patch it up, or sew it up, you have to let it dry out and dry up on its own. You have to be patient – not always my strongest point.

The graze happened to be just below my knee, so every time I bent my knee, it hurt. The skin was so tight that it was irritating. Never was it particularly painful, but it was irritating.

I have always been a picker of scabs, I find an enormous pleasure in scab picking, and am covered in scars. But this time I have been good. My mum seemed genuinely schooled and proud when I told her last week that I hadn’t picked at it. But I’ve genuinely been amazed at how it has healed, gradually the dark scab was getting smaller, and you could see the new, pink, healed skin surrounding it. You can still see that there was a cut, but it has healed considerably easier than if I had been badgering it and picking it constantly.

I asked a colleague for some advice this week, and her first comment to me was ‘you deal with things excellently, when you give it time and calm down’. So so so true. I’m not great with conflict, by any stretch of the imagination, and there have been numerous times when I have been frustrated and angry with things. Those things don’t go away, but with time they become easier to deal with. That may be because I have calmed down, or it may be because I then see a bigger picture. I was very upset with things at the beginning of the year, but actually now, am really encouraged by the rapid development of things. Small steps, big impact.

My graze has taught me a lot. We are going to get hurt in life, its part of the course, but it is how we deal with the hurt. Do we constantly pick, and prod, and poke, making it worse. Or do we allow it to heal on its own? We will always have to acknowledge it is there and possibly change to accommodate the hurt, but with time amazing things can happen.

I was reminded yesterday that it was a year since I wrote the post Stuck in the middle. This time last year I went through a process of deciphering my vocation. There was a lot of pain, confusion, and many many tears. But it was worth it. It helped me to deal with a lot of pain that had happened.

Ignoring hurt is not wise, but allowing the time to deal with it appropriately rather than prodding it, aggregating it, is the healer.