On being there

Several years ago there was a rush of events around a Thanksgiving time that included my dad being in the hospital for gall bladder surgery. As I recall there had been a snow storm and someone needed to help shovel mom and dad's driveway. I was in Tennessee and everyone else is in Minnesota. (It's still that way.)

I remember talking with one of my siblings (I have four) and saying how much I wanted to be there. I think it was a sister who said, "It's okay. There's nothing you can really do." She was trying to comfort me. And what she said was true: there wasn't anything more that I could do.

In a way, she felt similar to me, we wished we could do something. Something to fix it. Something to help. Oh, someone went and shoveled the driveway and made sure my mom could get to the hospital. People waited at the hospital and visited dad. Those were things that could be done. And they were done. But sometimes it doesn't seem like enough.

But I lived 900 miles away. My heart ached to be there even though there was nothing I could do.

I want that strong sense of wanting to be there even though there isn't anything to do to infuse my every day life here. A sense of focus on being over doing.

I still live 900 miles away from my family of origin. But recently I was enabled to be there for a family crisis (you can read about that here) which is no small feat. In-laws and friends helped my husband take care of our four homeschooled children so that I could just be a sister.

And in the being, there was doing: laundry, phone calls, playing with my niece, driving places. But the primary focus was being with some doing sprinkled in (even on the "busy" days).

I would like to take this back to my life: a focus on being rather than doing. Things still need to get done. I am responsible for more things now that I am home, responsible for different things.

But, I want the peaceful focus of being there to infuse my life all of the time.

Not sure how to do it. But then again I didn't know how to do many things while I was away. I trusted God just one step at a time. So I guess I'll keep doing that same thing: trusting one step at a time and

just being there.

Isn't that just what I said I wanted: to be versus do?


By the way, my dad recovered just fine from the gall bladder surgery those many years ago.