Stumbling Into Grace

Most surgeons perform around 500 operations a year for the 30 to 40 years they are in practice. If you add the procedures we do during training, surgeons walk into an operating room with the intention to heal ~15,000-20,000 times during their professional lives. In addition, for every patient a surgeon treats with surgery, there are at least 10 to 20 they will have seen who don’t require surgery but do require care. So the lives impacted during a typical surgical career number well over 100,000 and, when you include their families and friends, probably approaches half a million people. 

Nadia Bolz-Weber is a theologian and writer who shares her journey and her remarkable teaching in “The Corners” on Substack 

Photo credit - and link to "The Corners"

In her post The Sacred Act of Having No Idea What We Are Doing: On Complimenting Strangers and Sharing our Chicken Dinners, she shared this story…

She shakes my hand and says, “we’ve met – but I do not expect you to remember. I’ve waited 7 years to be able to tell you this: You shared your chicken with me that night and you have no idea what it meant.”

Not what I was expecting her to say.

She went on to tell me how that night, she was at a real low point in the middle of a very painful divorce. We were in the green room and she was supposed to introduce me and she was exhausted and hadn’t eaten all day. Apparently I looked up from my huge chicken dinner and was like, “I’m never gonna eat all of this, please help me out here” and it nearly made her cry.

I have literally no memory of this, but even if I did, I could never have known what it meant to her. 

Photo credit

We’ve all had a moment when someone, often a stranger, arrives at a moment of need to share their chicken dinner… or say just the words that heal something we may or may not have known was broken. Whether or not we recognize it, these moments create a subtle but profound shift in the way we view the world and ourselves. And, unbeknownst to us, we deliver the same moments of healing and grace to others. These moments can be deliberate, but more often they are not… and are as simple as picking up a small child covered in bandages to give them a hug, complimenting a stranger’s smile, or bringing a cup of coffee to an exhausted colleague and asking them - really asking them - how they are. 

 I can’t do it as well as Nadia Bolz-Weber, but here’s my blessing for you…. 

May you find yourself stumbling into sacred moments (even though you don’t know what you are doing, and probably don’t recognize them). And may you be open enough to recognize, accept, and celebrate the grace of chicken dinners, smiles, and cups of coffee that heal your soul.