Serendipity in the Slow: When Change Doesn’t Come Right Away

One early June in my childhood, I fell running up the steps of our family friends’ house. They lived in a wonderful two-story historical home next to our grade school playground. It had quarter-sawn oak floors, soaring ceilings, and fireplaces to spare. I felt like a queen in a castle when I babysat their young twins there. I had scaled their charmingly imperfect front stone steps on countless visits, but this time, whether from excitement or urgency, I leapt two at a time. I didn’t land solidly and my summer plans shattered to pieces along with the bone in my forearm.

I have to admit, the beginning of my recovery was a bit novel—I was the first of four children to claim a cast or bear a broken bone. I napped in the living room close to the TV during the day and my mother made sure I had plenty of my favorite snacks within easy reach. I basked in the extra attention.

Still, it didn’t take long for me to realize that “6 to 8 weeks” is a long time in middle-schooler years. I soon started to focus on all I was missing outside the walls of my well-stocked, air-conditioned sanctuary. 

Top of that list was softball. Although loyal and hardworking, I was never the star on the court or on the field. But that summer, after years in the outfield, I had finally risen to the top of the pitching roster for my Harper Youth Softball team—that summer was mine. And then the unthinkable happened: I got in a hurry up those uneven steps and sustained a season-ending broken pitching arm. 

The game and practice schedule still on the refrigerator as I got my “permanent cast” seemed a constant reminder of what might have been.

Then, just a few weeks after my fall, my little brother fell at a local farm auction. To my mother’s disbelief, my six-year-old sibling broke his arm, too. 

We began a summer regiment of check-ups, new casts, and x-rays, as we slowly flipped the calendar pages toward a new school year.

That summer taught me something I hadn’t yet realized: Whether it’s grief, or trauma, or physical injury, slow is how we were designed to heal—and bond. 

Whether it’s grief, or trauma, or physical injury,
slow is how we were designed to heal—and bond. 

TIME BUILDS RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

‘It takes time’ doesn’t necessarily mean that change comes slowly (though it may)—it means that things that matter require a sacrifice of time.

Ruth Chou Simons

I’ve learned that’s especially true for relationships. 

And it all started with a pitching arm that was slow to heal.

My brother’s break was more serious than my own—partly due to the place the bone snapped, and partly due to his age. His recovery was expected to last long past mine. But to everyone’s  surprise, mine took longer than predicted. Weeks stretched into months as my bone refused to heal completely, and the doctor delayed removing my cast in almost complete alignment with my brother’s release date.

When we first got our casts, it seemed my little brother and I were both headed for the worst summer of our lives, and with the baby of the family in worse shape than me, I wouldn’t even garner my parents’ special attention. So, as that summer got underway and all my friends were going to the pool or overnight camp or the softball field, my joy went with them.

But what stayed behind in our farm home were unencumbered hours and free schedules for my brother and I. We re-enacted a pricing gameshow with soup cans, boxes of cereal, and bottles of dish soap from our pantry. We worked adult-sized puzzles and played school as if our life depended on it. We creatively dressed kittens in doll clothes, staged elaborate puppet productions (with recorded sound effects), and made secret hideouts in our yard that we would have been too busy—and too far apart in age—to acknowledge. It was the summer I will always remember, but also the summer I never would have planned.

 An unexpected life is not the same as a bad life . . . I would have rushed through the seasons that hurt the most, rather than staying in the rearranged places where God chose to come close.

Jennifer Dukes Lee, in Growing Slow

Sometimes “God coming close” involves Him drawing us down an unexpected (often slow) road. I am at a place now, long removed from the pitching mound, where I can appreciate the slow-simmered gift of not only a human relationship, but also a divine one.

TIME BUILDS A RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

In the long ups and downs of my dad’s cancer journey, I watched his heart for Jesus soften, and deepen. Because of that, I’ve noticed God working in my own heart as well.

Eugene Peterson calls discipleship “a long obedience in the same direction.”

My job is to keep walking—however slowly—in the right direction. Mostly. That’s it. Little tweaks over time can change a destiny.  

Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny  

Lao Tzu

In that discipleship journey, the most important parts of us are changed gradually “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). And in the slowness of the process—as we fail and repent and renew our resolve on repeat—we glimpse God’s patience. And gradually become a new creation ourselves.

Chronic illness warriors learn there is no quick exit from discomfort—physically or spiritually.

When I was first diagnosed, I didn’t understand His slowness or silence then, and now all these years later, I still don’t. 

But I’m starting to wonder: Could the slowness BE the healing? The parts of me that have changed are not the ones I was praying about, but perhaps the more broken parts of me after all.

SLOW SHAPES US

Quick healing can feel like a miracle, but slow has a unique power to transform so many parts of us. 

Quick healing can feel like a miracle, but slow has a unique power to transform so many parts of us. 

Perhaps most critical—for me at least—slow is where I learned to release control. The constant reality of my failing heart has steadily chipped away at my illusion of control. A full decade into this, I am still learning. 

From my journal last week:

Feeling 100% recovered, I just had a post-stroke checkup with my neurologist. Addressing something you never want a doctor to say about you: “ongoing neurological deficits.” She shrugged them off, saying “Give it 12 to 18 months.” Are you kidding me?? They are minor and  I am grateful, but I am ready to move on. It felt like familiar territory. When I first became a cardiac patient, I was warned about how slowly change comes. But this time it’s somehow easier to trust His universal providence.

Turns out, the speed of God’s reply impacts more than me. Just as my arm not healing also affected my family (and especially my little brother), it’s not just about my plans.

We live such interconnected lives; I’m starting to appreciate that any change affects more than just me. Someone sent a card to encourage me in my upcoming transplant evaluation, saying they were praying for a “fast donor.” My heart skipped a beat, and I drew a quick breath, thinking, someone has to DIE for me to get a new heart. So that prayer is also asking for some donor with my blood type to die soon. 

But what if that person needs more time?  Time to see a child born or graduate or marry or return; Time to forgive, time to find God? 

For them, slow might be better.

Turns out, it was for me, too.

SLOW CREATES THE EXCEPTIONAL

I have a clear memory of that broken-arm summer though others have faded into a less distinct array of years. I recall curious people stopping us many times, asking for details of our injuries, or if we’d had a family car accident. 

What really happened that summer is that those weeks without softball and other activities, I formed a lifelong connection with my little brother that I may never have done, without the broken limbs. I wasn’t so grateful then, but I sure am today. My brother is a close friend and encourager even though we haven’t lived in the same city since high school. Our casts represented a gift I didn’t recognize at the time.

The bond my baby brother and I formed that summer has sustained us through changing careers and life disappointments, letting go of adult children and our own dreams, accepting my dire heart failure diagnosis, and losing both of our parents within four months. 

I’m afraid we would have missed out on something exceptional without that unexpectedly slow summer of healing.

Listen to this post read by the author HERE.