I recently moved out of my parents’ house to my own place. One of the things I have started to enjoy is cooking. My mum is an excellent cook, and she did a lot of the cooking while I lived at home and while I enjoyed it, there was less motivation for me to cook there.

Living by myself has meant that I have been cooking and baking much more, and this has meant more cuts and burns on my hands and arms, me being a bit clumsy by nature. Examining the healing process of the latest burn on my forearm has provoked some thoughts. The obvious being that healing takes time and the important of patience and the place for waiting. Not just aimless waiting, but waiting on God.

When the initial burn happened, it stung like nobody’s business, but I really didn’t see or feel the effect until the next couple of days where a painful blister had formed and boy did it hurt! Looking at the pattern formed as my body worked to heal really fascinated me. It pointed me back to the creator of said body – God. As I write this, my mind flashes back to the initial incident; it was under one second. I had been trying to flip a plantain I was roasting in the oven over to the other side, without actually taking the pan it was in out of the oven. I thought I could navigate it, but in a split second, my hand touched the edge of the HOT pan, and my God-given reflexed kicked in to immediately lift my hand off – but the damage had already been done. I feel like I’m diverting from the main points of my initial thoughts (typical!), but I think at the same time I am having two trains of thought. One is the appreciation of the amazing work of God in the workings of the body, and the second is the parallel I am trying to drawn from that.

Healing, patience, waiting.

A lot has happened this year that has stressed to me the need for waiting well, especially through painful situations. The pain of my burn did not kill me. The healing process did not kill me. God had already put the process in place, it was for me to wait and let it run its course. I can’t help but draw a parallel here to the painful situations I have found myself in. Situations where I have felt helpless to do anything about. Situations that where painful, so painful. All I could do was pray to God for strength and wait. Relief from the pain did not immediately come, but the grace to bear it certainly did.