“Fe tan kite tan.”
Translation: “Leave time to time. Meaning, don’t waste time reliving the past.”
No particular event warrants the posting of this proverb. But when I saw it I couldn’t pass over the simple beauty of it. I am definitely guilty of reliving the past, thinking about what I should have differently in one situation, how I could have avoided an incident if only I had done A instead of B. In recent weeks, as we have been working on finding Ednel and Ezechiel a forever family my mind wanders back to our hospital visits over the past year.
If you have never been around a child in excruciating pain and having very little power to make that pain subside it is perhaps the worst feeling possible. The helplessness eventually drove me to bring him to the hospital which was never a great relief. Knowing more about sickle cell crises now, having experienced them with Ezechiel as well as done some research, I deeply regret the times I made those decisions to hospitalize him. During those stays the gave him no pain meds, only mild sedatives, and insisted he needed iron (he didn’t). I regret not keeping him home where I could give him Tylenol and where he would be in the comfort of his home. When I think back to those horrible hospital days my gut wrenches. My decision did nothing to keep Ezechiel from pain, in fact it might have made it worse.
But I have to let the past be the past. I try to remind myself that God is everywhere. He was there with Ezechiel. He was there with me. Maybe without those visits the boys and myself wouldn’t have such a good relationship with their older brother. Maybe the time Junior, my translator, visited a woman with cancer during our day shift with Ezechiel gave her comfort as Junior reminded her of Jesus’ love. I will never know. But what’s over is over and I have to leave it be. I have to remember that Let go and let God applies to the past, present, and future.
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