Learning.

There is a room filled with little babies laying peacefully in slanting cots; babies in incubators with intravenous fluid access and oxygen therapy infused through a nasal cannula. Some call it the Nursery, but I call it the room with the babies that taught me patience. Even when they couldn’t speak, even when all they could do was cry from the pain of piercing a needle through their heels to obtain glucose tests, or scream from a simple response to hunger, these little ones showed me a new meaning of strength. They would soon return back to their state of peaceful sleep.

Being there for a week had an eerie way of making me want to be a dad so bad. And to think that yesterday, Friday, was my last day of rotations at the nursery, I’m going to miss them. I already do.

Today, I did church with my dear friend. But there, I made another friend who was kind with her words, sweet with her smell, and shared with me a kind of pleasant wisdom that comes with age. She let me seat on her usual spot because it was my first time. “Next time when you come, I will have to push you down the pew and take back my seat.”- She said. I smiled. “I will be back” – I said.

Sabbath school reminded me much of when I first arrived Jamaica and went to church on campus. When for the first time I met all of the pretty faces sitting at church, and thought everyone as innocent as they appeared; as strong and trouble free as they sounded, and felt a little out of place because I knew I had my weaknesses and troubles rumbling on the inside. But until I stayed for a while and saw that just like me, we were all vulnerable.

And somehow,now, I am not afraid anymore to let myself bare even in all of my weakness, or to be vulnerable in the dark. For just like learning patience from a baby in a cot or getting a smile from a sweet old lady at church, I learnt that we have all got something to give. However big, however small...and give, maybe even more than we really need to take. I am Learning.