The Healing Season

a devotional for late summer

My Dear Wildroot Parables Readers…

Happy September!

This is one of my favorite months of the whole year, and always feels very festive and “new yearish” thanks to the years I spent working in education. In honor of that feeling, you’ll notice a few aesthetic changes around the newsletter, including a slightly new color scheme, new icon, and new logo on the home page. I figured it was high time The Wildroot Parables got a little bit of branding love, and it somewhat matches its sister (my fiction site) Talebones!

I hope you have a truly blessed week, and please enjoy today’s devotional!

Photo by Fleur on Unsplash

whenever my heart breaks,
I bring it
cracked and creased
to the Healer,

and where I often expect
an instant fix
(needle and thread, 
glue and tacks)

instead
it feels
like nothing

but only at first;

because
the Healer's tools 
are never what they seem

and time
(that silent nurse)
does the Healer's bidding:

softening the edges
of every jagged scar.

Our little Huck had a routine surgery over the weekend. Probably the most routine and…intimate?…surgery a young dog can possibly get (ahem). I did as much homework as I could ahead of time, trying to be better prepared for the recovery period than I was with Finn when it was his turn, and one thing worried me most of all: you’re supposed to keep your dog calm and relatively still for a whopping 10-14 days after surgery, to allow the incision site to heal. Of those, the first several days are the most crucial.

And…uh…Huck doesn’t know what “calm and still” means.

Because of this, the vet prescribed us a dog-friendly sedative for her. It doesn’t fully knock her out or anything, but it does slow her down. Makes her reaction times a little bit delayed. She’s gets dozy and blinky and less inclined to run or jump, two activities very much not allowed while she’s recovering. Her funny, sweetheart personality is fully intact, she just can’t act on the active things she would normally want to do.

Seeing her so slow is not my favorite thing, and I hate that I can’t explain that to her and reason with her, but ultimately it’s preferable to internal bleeding.

Not to overspiritualize, but I often think that the way I wish I could explain things to my dogs is similar to the way God would deal with me, if I was able to understand His mind. Half the time I don't even realize I’ve experienced a wounding or an operation. All I can see is my own confusion, the healing season of slowness, the dulled senses, the things I’m not allowed to do while I recover. But God knows why, and God knows the consequences of letting me have the things I want.

Running and jumping with abandon aren’t bad things…unless you’re healing from a major surgery of which you were largely unaware. I can’t explain that to Huck, and God can’t explain that to me, either.

But the key? Huck trusts me. She trusts that when I stick a pill into a spoonful of her wet food, or tell her that she can’t jump up onto the couch, it’s not a bad thing. That I love her and I’m trying to take care of her. And I do, and I am.

Trusting that a season of healing may not feel like healing, at first, is trusting that God is a far better, wiser healer than I am. That He understands what I need better than I do, uncomfortable as that is to admit.

Little Huck will trust, and so will I. And through that trust, we will mend.

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