A Blue and Purple Finger

Whew! We’re already almost two weeks into the new year. It feels fresh though, as if I’m still only on the first page or so of the book of 2016. Perhaps in part because I’m still reading the books I started on or before January 1—Idylls of the King and Pursuing Justice, respectively. Books are something I commonly use to measure the passage of time. I hope to post about each of these two once I’m finished with them.

It’s funny how something small can affect you so much. A week ago Monday I slammed a car door on my left index finger. If you’ve ever performed a feat like that before, you know how much a swollen and bruised finger protests afterward with everything you do. There’s a lovely dark purple-blue blood blister around and under the nail (the exact color of my lavender soap!). Being swollen, it still looks like it belongs to another hand besides mine, but at least I can type with it now, make a fist, and play the piano, things I couldn’t do the first week! Lavender oil helped quite a bit. For the most part, though, it’s learned to stay out of the way when my hands are busy.

This has given me a glimpse of how people can compensate with worse injuries—take one day at a time, one activity at a time, modify how you do something or don’t do it at all (like shadow punch instead of hit the punching bag full force in martial arts class). Plus, it’s just been interesting…I know what a smashed finger feels like now, so I can write about it in a story someday! (*Cue absurd grin.*)

But isn’t it funny how easy it is to focus on our own small problems, and forget about the troubles in the world at large? I can guarantee you that silly little finger bruise has taken up more room in my mind than a host of vastly more important issues. God convicted me of that, so that every time I was tempted to mourn my finger, I would pray for someone else going through something far worse. It helped that I was reading Pursuing Justice by Ken Wytsma and D. R. Jacobsen. Talk about a mind-blowing book! I’ll get into it when I write my review, but it’s making me think about the world in a (hopefully) not so selfish, narrow-focused way.

I pray your new year has been happy and healthy so far! Has God been showing you anything lately? Have you ever been laid up with an injury or bad sickness? How did you cope? (When I hurt my Achilles tendon last year, that was an ordeal that brought with it lots of lessons. I still live with repercussions today.)