I folded my hands over my apron. I leaned back on my chair. I contemplated the ceiling fan caked in kitchen grease. Her voice over the speakerphone was steady and logical, “The only way to do this right is to strategize. Don’t say the wrong thing. Think really carefully. Use your lawyer training.”
I muted her to shout back to my husband on the stairs with a toddler who needed a diaper change, “I’m still on the phone; hang on!!” I unmuted her to um-hum along. Strategy. Wrong thing. Think. Sounds awful.
But her phone call was one of a short-list of deep-seated confidants I had entrusted my awkward situation to. And every time I enumerated what had happened, what was happening, and what was likely to happen next, I lost clarity. Me, a verbal processor, felt two steps back. I knew with less certitude how to respond to this issue before me. And I felt more upset. But this talking-it-out approach had always worked for me. Why the change?
+ + +
The last meeting of my 30-week with my spiritual director, he came by in the evening to the house to listen, pray, and then cheers a sparkling water with my husband and I. He listened and prayed because he knew that was what worked. The practice of repetition. The practice of presence. I poured out; he listened.
And somewhere in the very act of having someone listen, pray, and respond, over weeks and months on end, something had changed inside me. Someone with no agenda but patiently praying the Spiritual Exercises alongside me. Someone with no motive other than to help and be a vehicle for grace for our family. Someone with no previous impression but that I was a sister in Christ who needed help. God used this person to help something shift.
We cheers with lime La Croix cans that July evening. We celebrated the desire to be transformed into Christ. And already within me, I knew of one change. The change of living with an unprotected heart.
+ + +
Days stretched on with the resolution to this conflict in the not-so-distant horizon. But the critical questions of how I would act and what I would say and anticipating the other person’s next move? They fell flatter each time I rounded back to them. And the one night when I woke up at 2 a.m., I knew something had to shift me back to feeling free. In that darkened room, on that cold early morning when our drafty windows let in a few too many whooshes, it sat clear: I had built up protections around my heart again because of this re-triggering trauma. And I had disconnected from God in doing so.
You see, my heart can’t be open to Him and be closed to someone else. It can’t be porous to the lapping of Love’s waves, and sealed off to the freezing rain of someone’s words. It’s either open or it’s not. I’m either allowing Him to direct or I’m not. If I’m in charge again, strategizing, hyper-analyzing, not sitting interiorly in stillness, I will work myself into a knot. A not-God, not-goodness, not-Love existence. Again. How it was before.
+ + +
I don’t know how I’ll breath without protection. I don’t know how I’ll sustain the monsoons and tsunamis and ordinary-but-deadly ocean waves. And I don’t have to know. He’ll teach me to breathe underwater.
So if you’re in a knot of anxiety because you’re awaiting an outcome, bracing for news, sick-to-your-stomach over what happened over the week, and planning and scrambling, guess what? You ultimately can’t row yourself to peace. You might get along this way for decades. (I did.) You might think it’s actually going quite well, being in charge, being in command, being a good problem solver. (I did.) Maybe it is, for now. But we’ll all hit rock bottom: a place we can’t out-think, out-run, or out-maneuver. (I did.)
Can we borrow some courage to live with an unprotected heart after that? Do we know that’s the only way forward to building a life of peace? Peace comes at the cost of constant danger, constant vulnerability, constant attack. But I’ll live in that place even if it means this situation totally blows up and me being honest, un-strategic, and straight-forward ends up terribly for me.
The life of a protected heart is a life not worth living.
To being His, free, and open to all the heart’s hurts,
Nell
Hi Nell, this was so good. Thank you so much for writing it and sharing it with us!
Thank you for this - I needed it!