About 3 weeks after I completed the fourth grade, I broke my ankle. I’ll spare you the gory details, suffice to say it my foot went a direction that the rest of my leg didn’t agree with. It hurt. A lot. I screamed. A lot. This was also probably the last time my mom ever carried me as she loaded me into the car to go to the hospital—thanks adrenaline.
The hospital confirmed my brokenness and told me that I would need a cast that went up to my mid-thigh to ensure proper healing and immobilization. If you’ve ever had to wear a cast, then you know that it is the worst! Walking with crutches is awkward, bathing is difficult, and the itching is enough to drive someone crazy. Despite all the annoyances, I understood the purpose of my cast. My bones were broken and needed time to heal, and no matter how aggravated I was, the only answer was patience.
We don’t like patience. I didn’t want to wait for my bones to heal, I wanted to just start walking. In our current situation, we want things to be back to what we were used to before. Unfortunately, we still need to wait and trust in God’s timing. A hard truth I had to learn, as I contemplated smashing my cast to scratch my knee, and something many of us are facing now, just because you are sick of it, doesn’t mean that it’s over.
You had plans carefully crafted, regrettably Covid had another plan. Many of us are being stretched farther than we’ve ever been stretched before. We hate the world we are required to live in right now. That’s okay. It’s okay as long as you don’t let that annoyance turn into anger. As Christians we are called to be the people of hope. We have hope for sinners, hope for a lost and dying world, and hope in a better world that is to come.
Paul reminds us of this in 2 Corinthians 1, “3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
My leg mostly healed but it wasn’t perfect. A better time is coming. It may be different from before or anything we could plan. We don’t know how long that time will take to get here. As the people of hope I pray that we are able to be a source of comfort in these uneasy times rather than people who pile on the impatience with others. Lean into the comfort of God even when plans don’t work out the way you would want them to.