Devotion 301 - bandaids

I remember the cry like it was yesterday.

I had never heard her cry in pain, but I knew as every mother knows.

She had only been with us for a few months when it happened, when I heard her cry. 

My husband came up from our friend’s basement.  It happened so quickly….he was there when Ava’s little finger got caught in the treadmill.  I knew instantly it could have been so much worse and I thanked God even in Ava’s pain. 

I had heard Ava cry in fear.  The first day she came to us.  She didn’t know us; she didn’t know me.  It took moments and minutes of tears and then her body melted into mine.  But I would hear that fearful cry again and again when she wouldn’t see me.  It was our first exercise in trust.  As soon as the children would hear her waking they would run and get me.  She would see me and know she could trust.  She had been alone for two years in an orphanage, I didn’t wish her two more minutes of loneliness or fear.

I now looked at her finger, there was a gash and it was bleeding but nothing a band aid would not fix.  We put on some cream, wrapped it in a band aid and I kissed it long and hard.  I remember Ava’s eyes.  This was new.  Pain accompanied by love.  She didn’t forget. 

The wound closed in a week, maybe two but her request for band aids did not wane.  Every night we would lay in bed, we would read and we would pray and then she would say, “bambee”.  I learned ever so slowly that this had become part of our routine, part of our ritual. 

As the boxes of band aids emptied I learned to shop at the bargain store for cheaper alternatives.  I slowly tried to discourage the use of them for perfectly healthy fingers.  Weeks would pass and no “bambees” were needed and then it would happen again and again.

I wondered why.

My eldest daughter, now ten, sat and read an article in a magazine.  She read it and then I watched her page back and read it again.  A quiet filled the room and I wondered why.

She looked up and said, “I’d like you to read this.”  I was busy,  kitchen chores and laundry filled my mind but there was something insistent in her tone.  I took the magazine and read about a 10-year old girl facing a school assignment to list the traits she had inherited from her parents.

The fictional girl struggled.  She didn't feel she could complete the assignment.  She did not know her birth parents.  She was adopted.

The 10–year old facing the fear of an incomplete assignment finally took her worries to her mother.  Her mother, anointed by the Holy Spirit explained some giftings come through nature and many also through nurture.  The ten-year old bravely completed the assignment with the twist of nurture and the teacher applauded her for her efforts.

I now sat across from my daughter, my 10-year old, and asked her what she thought about the article.  A book had been opened in her heart that it seemed she wasn't ready to read.  Lily is facing no assignment but rather the fear of loneliness.  For the first time she grieved a biological mother she will never know and I grieved with her.

I thought I knew what to do.  I am an expert.  We get a band aid, we kiss it, and it is better, but I was lost as to how we band aid the heart.

I prayed quietly and then thought of a dozen quirky and beautiful things Lily has seemed to inherit from my mother, her daddy and me. 

We were quickly laughing, but my heart felt a twinge of pain, and a band aid was not the answer,  not today and not in days to come. 

Pain is the great instigator.  We feel grief and we run;  we run to more pleasant memories.  We feel loneliness and we sprint to a thousand distractions.  We feel blame and we point to others.  We feel suffering in ourselves or our children and we hunt for band aids. 

But when the blood flood Beloved two thousand years ago, those at the foot of the cross did not stand to bandage Him, they stood to be washed by Him.  Washed in the blood.

Lily and I are in a new season, a season of questions. Do we run and hide?  Or do we stand ready to open the book of her biological mother’s sacrifice; the sacrifice that gave us the precious gift of a daughter.   We will stand with her, her questions, her grief and let Him wash us in healing.

I long to save a few dollars and insist we stop buying band aids for my baby daughter, but these band aids do not wrap a hurt finger, they swaddle a hurt heart.

There is a little heart inside her petite chest that knows every time she asks there is an answer, a kiss and an embrace.  We will answer until her heart is sure without a doubt we are here for her always.  It is through that simple act of trust we can point her to the One that is always there.  It is He that will never leave and He that will never forsake.

 

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.  Psalm 147:3