It took me longer than it should have: for the little girl, I was saying a prayer pretty quickly. But her mother too needed serious help and they clearly needed intervention.
It took awhile last night for me to acknowledge the sense of being tapped on the shoulder: Ahem.
Yes. Yes, I do hear You, I’m sorry, I’m on it. And I added a prayer for the woman who pushed me yesterday, and then the older woman with them and then all three of them together, but to be honest, it was with a sense of reluctance and of giving up on the one.
I wrote that post, I said that prayer, I knitted, I did my treadmill time, and as I racewalked, I kept being drawn back to the mystery of them: how had they come to this point? Was there anything anyone could do to make a difference? Thank heavens it (presumably) wouldn’t have to be me again–but the one thing I could do is say another prayer and mean it a little more from the heart this time. And so I did.
It became easier to.
The thought settled in, as I hoped that maybe that was her lowest point at a bad time in her life and that perhaps it might shock her into seeing what she had become: she had assaulted the one person around whom she couldn’t just brush it off later as Oh, I bumped into someone. Rather, she pushed hard the one person around whose sense of balance was via tactile feedback, so that there was a very large and very public display of danger to that person in direct consequence to her actions and that she had to have had to dodge, although at that point I was suddenly not paying any attention to her to be sure of that. (As Richard on the other side turned to see and grabbed to steady the suddenly projectile cart.)
Lots of people saw. She could walk away but she would not be able to get away from herself on this one. Nobody yelled at her, nobody stopped her, nothing else she could project the blame onto. Just her. She has to live with it.
I see two potential paths from there: either she refuses to acknowledge to herself any fault for anything anytime.
Or if only. She wishes she’d done better and tries to make up for it by treating others better from here on out. Maybe not now, maybe later; I think of a story Rachel Remen tells of one of her older patients glad for her cancer, wishing for retribution for the many evils she wished now at last she hadn’t done in her life, finally acknowledging them out loud. Dr. Remen heard story after terrible story of this woman who’d been a child in a war zone trying to survive alone, carrying that anger into adulthood, and realized, “I am her first witness.”
What a horribly long wait to begin to heal emotionally.
One of the things I’ve learned is that when you pray for someone, the answers don’t always come fast, they don’t always come in the ways you expect or even understand at first, and they very often come through other people.
May that woman encounter the other people she needs in the way she needs at the times that she needs. Starting right now seems to me would be good.
As I continued to say those prayers last night and today, I found myself increasingly able to give the whole scene up to God and, as far as anything concerning myself, to let it go.