What Remains to Be Tended

When one of our hives swarmed recently, our attention turned to the colony that remained.

It needed care. We had to look closely, notice its condition, and help it regain strength. Knowing what the hive had been before could only tell us so much. The work in front of us was to understand what it needed now.

That thought has stayed with me.

After a difficult experience, we sometimes keep measuring ourselves against who we were before it happened. How easily we worked. How much we could carry. How certain we felt. We look for familiar signs that we are all right again.

But some experiences stay with us. They become part of how we see the world, even as we continue living in it.

Hurricane Melissa was traumatizing. We lost a few trees, but we were safe, and our bees survived. I am deeply grateful for that. I also know that, in other parts of the island, people were facing devastation far beyond our own experience.

Our safety did not make their suffering distant.

What heartened me was seeing people pull together. There was so much that could not be put right quickly, yet people found ways to help. Someone else’s need became a reason to act.

I think that is one of the things that allows hope to take root: being met with care while the difficulty is still real.

I thought about the reach of that care at JIBE, listening to a woman speak about her work with people with albinism in Africa who are marginalized. I wish I remembered her name. What I remember is feeling as though I were in the presence of an angel.

Her words brought people I had never met into my thoughts, along with the care she had chosen to offer them. I went there to share what I make. I came away thinking about what it means to make room in our lives for another person’s need.

These experiences have been shaping my understanding of being resilient.

I think about the colony that needs strengthening. The people who helped after the hurricane. The woman whose care reached into lives far from my own.

Each reminds me how much strength is sustained through relationship. We need care, and we have care to give. Sometimes we are the ones offering a hand. Sometimes we have to allow someone to take ours.

That can be difficult when we are accustomed to being capable. It asks us to acknowledge that our strength has limits, and to let ourselves be loved within those limits.

Sometimes faith means caring for what is in front of us without knowing how it will turn out. I am learning to do the work within my reach and trust God with the parts I cannot hold together myself.

I want to pay closer attention to what needs tending, in the hive, in the people around me, and in my own life.

I cannot ask the hive to be exactly as it was before. I can pay attention to what it needs now and tend it faithfully.

I am learning to offer myself that same patience.