what healing looks like

She turned to me with her big brown eyes looking suddenly thoughtful and said with a slow smile, “I never thought about it that way.”    She looked away for a moment and then back at me and said again, “I never thought about it that way.”  . . . and her smile grew.

Her baby was only 5 weeks old when she died.  She never had been able to come home.  And in that moment, we simply shared that there is no set number of years that determine whether a life is whole.  If this little one inspired love from those around her; if she loved in return with her precious newborn eyes, then her life was whole – no matter how long it was.  She changed the lives around her in deeply loving ways. . . . and isn’t that what makes a life whole ?

I was witnessing healing at work in that moment.  Her words were the very evidence that suddenly she was seeing another way to live in her skin.  There was light emerging around the edges of the heaviness that she knew so well.  It was warm and hopeful . . . the way healing feels. 

And that is how it works . . . not dramatic, necessarily, or brilliantly insightful . . . but simple . . . as a new, never imagined perspective dawns.   And the opening in the heart widens a little more.  

It is creation happening before our eyes and it is beautiful.