Installment Three - The Body - The Church

This is the third, and final installment of my anthology about my injured hand and The Church.

During this six week process the feet have been just a bit smug about their role of being “rooted and grounded” and proclaiming to the rest of the body that they have to take on the whole weight of the body and convey it from place to place.

Then, in the dark of night, the foot, not looking where it was going, stubbed its toe – it has been strangely silent about the woes of the hands ever since. In fact, it was quite ashamed of the way it stumbled and limped for several days.

There is one final event that has taken place between the two hands. After the initial pain began to ease it was replaced with an ache, common to many broken bones. Sometimes the ache would wake me up at night because there was no position where the right arm did not hurt. One night the left hand began to caress and stroke the right hand and arm. Suddenly the ache began to lessen. As the right hand began to relax, under the stroking of the left hand, the ache diminished. Now the left hand will often stroke and massage the right hand – and the healing continues.

In I Corinthians 12 Paul tells us that "The Body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts...and so it is with Christ." He goes on to say "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it..."

We are the Body of Christ and we need to function as a whole, but when one part suffers, the rest of the body needs to adjust, and pitch in, and continue to function as a whole.

Installment Two - The Body - The Church

This is the second installment of my anthology about my injured hand and The Church.

There were many tasks that the left hand could not accomplish alone. It asked the feet to help out, but they protested that they needed to stay “rooted and grounded” and could not possibly come up and help. The right hand tried to help out, but again shooting pains told the whole body that it was not nearly ready to even begin to help. The left hand was frustrated, there were things the brain was asking it to do that I simply could not accomplish, so it asked for help elsewhere. Soon two other hands came to its assistance (Bill with a primary working left hand) and did those tasks as instructed or as he best saw fit. The new hands continued to help out whenever needed and are, in fact, continuing to step in from time to time even to this day. The new hands, always a friend to the left hand and the right hand, have become even better friends.

It is now 6 weeks later and the air cast has been stowed in a closet, hopefully to never be needed again. The right hand is beginning to reassume its appointed tasks, but it will be several months, the doctor tells me, before it will have close to full strength again. The left hand is happy to be able to continue some of its tasks, which it now is able to do better than the right hand. In fact, I suspect, the left hand will continue to be of great help to the whole body from now one.

In the beginning the left hand had a tendency to question the Creator and wonder why, at this age, it was suddenly asked to do so much. It had an unspoken complaint that the Creator could have at least warned it ahead of time so it could have begun to at least practice some of the tasks it was asked to do. It also blamed the right hand for allowing it to be so complacent and always having to be “in charge”.

Now, however, as the left hand looks back on the whole experience, it realizes that it really was never interested in helping all that much. Oh, there were always some tasks it helped with because there are some tasks that require two working hands, but it was, to be really honest, quite content to allow the right hand to do most of the work.

The right hand also looks back and realizes that it had a strong tendency to take over most tasks. There were a few times, granted not all that many, that the left hand attempted to do something, but it was too clumsy, too slow, too…and the right hand got impatient and said (irritably) “let me do that” and took over the task, relegating the left hand to a very secondary position. Now it realizes that it needed to go through the pain to learn that it does not always need to be first. It realizes that it is a good thing for the left hand to have become stronger. It has lost some of its arrogance and it is determined not to forget even when the healing is complete.