31.40 Band Aid Religion

77% Weekly Newsletter
Religion-Outside-The-Box

The 77% Weekly

The 40/52-weeks-a-year, spiritual-religious newsletter

From Rabbi Brian 31/40

Band-Aid as a Metaphor

A few years ago, I cut my thumb pretty badly while I was working on some stained glass. No stitches though – thank God.

Here’s what I wrote about it:

There’s a band-aid covering the tip of my very sensitive left thumb.

It’s going to get better, just not on my timetable.

I want to point pull back the band-aid and check to see if my thumb has healed.

I know it hasn’t. And yet, I still want to check.

I know that my body – a most glorious, self-righting organism – will heal itself after a week, or two, or three.

But I still want to check now.

I think life is like that.

There are some things in life that just can’t happen any sooner than they can happen. And while we know this, we obsessively check on them anyway.

This is spoken to by Rainer Maria Rilke:

I would like to beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Sadly, we often lose patience with ourselves for failing to be just slightly ahead of where we actually are.

I encourage you to put a band-aid on your finger and let it remind you to wait patiently for your life to unfold.

Spiritual-religious advice: Wait. Be patient. Life will unfold.

 

 

With love,

Rabbi Brian

Rabbi Brian

Rabbi Brian
W
Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer is the founder of Religion-Outside-The-Box.


Shortly after he was ordained as a rabbi, he left mainstream congregational life to encourage people to find and be with (the) God (of their understanding).
His day job is teaching advanced mathematics to Los Angeleno High School students. The rest of the time is with his family.

An ROTB Podcast

ROTB-Podcast

 

Go And Fail!

Rabbi Brian talks about how FAILURE is the key to success.

ROTB Prayer Page
PrayerRequest

Add or see names on

The ROTB f/b prayer list

 


 

ROTB SURVEY
PrayerRequest

Add or see names on

THANK YOU!

Thank you to the 600+ people who filled out the ROTB survey!


 

Rabbi Brian’s Tweets!

  !Add or see names

Click to follow
Rabbi Brian on Twitter.


 

 

Support ROTB…
I would love to tell you that 77% of subscribers make some donation, but the truth is that far, far, far less than 23% do. 
Click for details.

Consider making a one-time donation …

 

$1000

$180

$77

$15

Donate Donate Donate Donate

or consider giving monthly donations …

$77 a month

$6.42 a month
($77 a year)

$3,34 a month

($1 an issue)

Subscribe
  |
Subscribe
 |
Subscribe

I THANK YOU!

ROTB’s newsletter, website, and podcasts cost thousands of dollars to publish and maintain.  Please consider making a contribution to help defray the costs.


 

Rabbi Brian Doesn’t Understand

In the 18th century, in Hannipol, a small district of Khmelnytskyi Oblast, in present-day western Ukraine, there was a rabbi known as Reb Zusya. Zusya, a pious man, taught about humility and had a strange habit of referring to himself in the third person. Instead of saying, “I am hungry,” or “I don’t understand,” he would say, “Zusya is hungry,”

Read More »

Travesty

I rewind the etymology podcast 15 seconds because I missed the details about the origin of the word travesty. I want to listen again—more closely—so I learn it, so I can recall it later in conversation… because if I tell you how travesty—from “traverse” and “clothing”—came to mean “shockingly unfair,” you’ll think I’m smart. Lost in that thought, I suddenly

Read More »

The Soup We Are In

Most of the time, even when we don’t really need to be rushing (and sometimes without realizing we are rushing) a really large percentage of us rush anyhow. Seems we are angled forward, always striving to get ahead. I get it. It’s the soup we are in. Our society conflates productivity, hurriedness, and worth. We take on the flavors around

Read More »
77% Weekly Newsletter
77% Weekly Newsletter