October 17, 2024
“I don’t think she likes me anymore,” my daughter confided after school, talking of her new best friend—the one she’d made over the summer, just after her previous best friend moved across the country. Tears glistened in her eyes, lips quivering, brows tilted inward and down. Her normally bright face looks up at me, asking for me to make it untrue.
“Oh honey, I’m sorry, that sounds really hard. Can you tell me what happened?”
“When I saw her on the playground, instead of saying hi, she said ‘oh no’!” The tears fall now, she collapses in my arms. We stand there, embracing in the kitchen, until I scoop her up and go to the couch, where we sit for a moment as the storm makes its way through her heart.
At some point she brightens again with the resolve of a plan. “Tomorrow I’m going to ask her.”
The next day she reports, “I talked to her. She said she didn’t know why she said ‘oh no,’ it came out by accident, she meant to say hi. Now we’re best friends again.”
It’s so simple, so hard. You’re hurt by someone. You go to them. You talk to them.
I’m amazed at her courage.
What my daughter doesn’t know, or maybe does, and faces head on anyway, more than adults are typically willing to, is the terrible risk of facing the place of your pain. Is there anything more vulnerable than baring the hurt someone has caused you, owning up to the wound you’re carrying, still raw, and asking the wounder to see you, to regret it? What if they meant to, and they don’t regret it? What if they instead leap at a chance to finish the job? What if they decline to see you at all, and you’re left abandoned, wound exposed?
We may or may not make these calculations consciously, but so often we carry them in us, carry the pain of having tried to share hurt and been rebuffed, that we are not brave enough to walk up to the person who greeted us with an ‘oh no’ and seek restoration.
What makes you brave enough to face the possibility of rejection?
Maybe it has something to do the experience of being scooped up and held with your pain by someone whose love is bigger than the threat of what you stand to lose.
This is something parents seek to do for children—weave a net of love strong enough to catch them where others fall short. When you’re securely attached, held in loving embrace, both real and metaphorical, it is safer to risk being hurt.
But we do not love perfectly; there are frayed ends in the net, knots coming loose.
And we too need to be held secure, scooped up and cradled with our pain and fear, made free to give the love others need from us. How do we do that other than from the abundance of what we’ve received?
When you’re held by love is bigger than the threat of what you stand to lose, you are free to risk. The only love big enough to do that, who will not fray or come loose, let us slip through, is God’s. So often we hustle and sweat to be someone else’s net, when so much of what we really need to do is rest and receive what we cannot create for ourselves: my daughter in my arms, consoled and held before she is brave.
This post wasn’t meant as a promo for the upcoming Advent season retreats, but it might as well be. Think of these offerings as a place to come sit in the arms of love with whatever oh no you carry. More information & registration: tangible.com/events.
