So I went the other day and got a piercing. Old news, already been blogged about. Scroll down if you missed it. Dull stuff really.
There was an interesting part though.
The after care advice has been hanging with me and not just because I have to take care of my piercing, but because this is really actually good solid advice that could be applied to life in general.
After you get pierced, they give you some instructions about how to care for yourself to stay healthy.
Hear this through and think about it on all the levels, not just physical health.
The advice was LITFA.
Leave It The F Alone.
You have a fresh wound. The best way for it to heal is to leave it alone. Don't play with it. Don't pick the scab off. Don't rub stuff into or onto it. If you don't leave it alone, it will get infected. It will scar.
At the time, I didn't think much about it other than, okay, easy advice.
But later, I started thinking about it in the context of other areas of life. Let's try it out on a heart.
A heart wound won't heal if you don't leave it alone for a while. Much like a piercing, if you touch it all the time the healing will take much longer and be more painful. A scab is a part of the healing process, leave it alone because it's a form of protection to the wound. It keeps infections out. Infections create scars.
Now, I wasn't told to not clean it. It is a wound and needs to be cleaned, but in a very specific way. A soul wound is the same way. It needs to be cleaned, in a specific way--I'd say a God way--but that's my bent in life. The cleaning is careful, focused and gentle. Highly specific. Sometimes done by a professional or under the supervision or instruction of a professional.
With proper care and cleaning, the wound heals easily and quickly, without much pain or scarring. The wounded place is healed stronger and in some cases more beautiful than before.
Our hearts and souls are the same way. They get wounded because we're human and that's life. It's how we care for the wounds that determines the length of healing time and the size of the scar. The wound care determines if it heals stronger or if it heals ugly.
When he was pushing a needle through my body, I was thinking about the things in my life that led me to want to make this a permanent external mark on me. The after care instructions were something I took in matter of fact because I wanted my "wound" to heal "pretty". (Yup, still a girl with a vanity streak.) But over the next hours, it seemed pretty clear to me that this would be a little tid bit of instruction that I could apply in a lot of different areas in my life.
What do you think? Is LITFA advice you could apply in your life?
