That I May Heal You
With my nudging, my twelve-year-old son recently joined the mountain bike team like his older brother. Yesterday I dragged him up to a trail and insisted that we do a little practice. We planned to do some loops on a trail he likes. On our second lap I heard an “Ow!” up ahead of me. I found that he had fallen to the side of the trail, and from my perspective it looked like he had received a scrape to his leg. He seemed okay and we continued riding. A little later we looked at his leg more closely and discovered it was not exactly a scrape—he had a ton of little pricklies in him. It turns out that he had fallen on a prickly pear cactus. I took him home and my wife tried multiple remedies to get the hundreds of cactus spines out of one leg. She put duct tape on pulled it off—that got some of them. She tried Elmer’s glue, letting it dry and pulling that off, and that got some more. But ultimately for the majority of them she had to use tweezers to pull them out one by one. It was a painst...