I was returning from a walk. As I rounded the corner and headed down the block toward home, my attention was caught by the crouching young man. He is blind. He had his dog on a leash stretched as far from the man as it could reach, and they were on the front lawn of their home. Quickly I realized what I was seeing. The man was attempting to pick up his dog’s poop. He had a plastic bag on his hand and was sweeping it in arcs from farthest out around his body. The dog stood by at the leash end.
As I neared, I asked if I could help.
“Yes,” he replied.
I asked if I could touch him.
“Yes,” he replied again.
As I crouched next to him, my hand on his, I guided with my words to the spot where the poop sat and let him apprehend the poop and bag it up.
He said, “I hate when that happens.”
I was cheery as I walked away.
What did you just show me Lord? It is just like healing work. We want to pick up the poop on our own and process the mess, but instead you place a come alongside with sight to point out the poop. In our blindness you make a way by bringing us a sighted guide. I didn’t bag it. I asked if I could help. The young blind man humbled himself and allowed me to help. It is beautiful to you, our healing work. You see it all, all the poop, and rather than bagging it all for us, while you can, sometimes you instead choose others to come alongside.
I know it was just a moment. I suspect this happens to the young man with some regularity. His dog is not helpful in this task. Often the ones who cause the mess are not helpful. It takes another, with sight. And how did I get sight for helping others? Sight came from the come alongside sighted guide who gave me time and love and led me through my time of deep mourning and profound healing. It was hard. It took time. It was painful. It was messy. But you God, in my realization of needing help, being humble and asking for it, brought sight where I was once blind.
Through pain and heartache, disappointment, neglect, depression and anger, you birthed a capacity to be eyes for another. That is compelling. It is an incredible story of turning mess into something profoundly good and beautiful. It is the capacity to love and listen and encourage and say, “Follow me, this is the way, you too can be healed, this is how I felt and now I can see, this is what I believed but now I see the lies and I believe the truth, the truth about you God and the truth about me. The truth about what you think of me, how you see me and what you say about me. The truth.”
I would venture to guess that many don’t realize how important healing is to you. Healing work allows your truth to lodge into those deepest, broken places, filling the empty, hurting places with the balm of truth and your love and your care. It is amazing that you care more for me than I can imagine and that you care more about my healing than I do. That you can see my healing is not just for me, though that would be enough for you. My healing is for my husband and my son. My healing is for my family. My healing is for my friends. My healing is for those I come into contact with in every part of my day. My healing is magnified and multiplied in ways I never, ever imagined.
My work, my tears, my disappointments, my time, my understanding and revelation is all used by you God for your glory to encourage others. How can that be? How Lord can that be? My yes to the process, a process many are not willing to undertake or complete, was worth everything. You have used it beyond what I could think or imagine.
So Lord, I am settled in you. I am settled knowing that the poop is not too much for you. You are willing to come alongside, guide and encourage and allow me to apprehend the poop and come alongside another; to guide, to be eyes that see and ears that hear, to be you in messy places, to be reals, fully transparent, about my messes and my healing. I am honored. I am full. I am settled in you. Thank you Lord for your good work.
Excerpt from Loving and Faithful