It Took A Bowl To Get My Attention

It took a bowl to get my attention. 

I am a doer by nature and love nothing more than checking items off my list.  Frantic and hurry are my normal. The tyranny of the urgency rules often. I often sacrifice important things in order to react to urgent things. My greatest pitfall is letting the urgent crowd out the important, and sadly, I fall into that trap often in life.  Yet, in the midst of my repetitive struggle, I see God's kindness and pursuit and help especially in recent days.   

My bowl, my favorite white ceramic salad bowl along with a quiche dish, decided together to plummet from the top cabinet and crash into a zillion pieces onto my kitchen counter Saturday evening while my eldest and I were cooking taking me out with it.  A shattered piece somehow managed to sever an artery in my dominant index finger and cut my tendons in that same finger as well as affect my other fingers a bit too since everything is so interconnected.   My life came to a grinding halt.  

Part of my story is medical trauma.  Hospitals are scary places for many and I am no different. As I stumbled to the kitchen sink that Saturday evening to reach for a towel to try to rig up some sort of tunicate, I schemed to avoid the ER.  In the end, my scheming did not work as my injury was too complicated and severe for urgent care and they sent us on.  In between my dizziness from loss of blood, terror filled me. Horror stories filled my mind and I forgot that God is everywhere and directing my path in this fallen world.   My heart, which to my knowledge, has NEVER acted up decided to do so as evidenced by constant beeping of machines and a room full of doctors and nurses. I was treated for that and my finger tentatively fixed only to be reopened and operated on in the first week of March.  

God's grace abounded in each place and my experiences on that frightful night were a healing balm to past traumas. Tim Keller has a quote that says something to the extent of if we knew everything God knows, we would choose everything he does. Strangely that quote brought comfort. 

Here I sit now four days post injury waiting and hoping to be worked in at a doctor's office to more fully understand my medical situation so I am cleared for surgery.  With fuller knowledge each day, I wonder how this story will end.  What capacity will my right dominant hand work at again?  Do I have a heart condition or is it just a benign heart arrhythmia as now suspected after meeting with a cardialogist yesterday? Time will tell.  One thing is for sure, my pace is slowed and presence, not hurry, is what I get to practice.