We spent 3 days this week in the hospital with my teenage foster daughter. She is fine now, but as I sat in the emergency room, and as I walked past the windows of the emergency waiting room over the next few days and each time saw a whole new group of people waiting for a doctor, I remembered one of my favorite quotes from Anne Lamott. This is from her book Traveling Mercies:
"Our preacher Veronica said recently that this is life's nature: that lives and hearts get broken -- those of people we love, those of people we'll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency room and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers."
There are moments in our life when we have deep compassion, when we see that we are all in this together. On this day of celebrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let us open our hearts:
May we be filled with lovingkindness.
May we be well.
May we be peaceful and at ease.
May we be happy.
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