“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
I am a joyful person. I enjoy my life, and I love people. I smile and laugh a lot, and it’s deeply genuine.
I have also had the 3 am moments with raw emotion, Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream and Pat Benetar.
I’m a woman, and I have been gifted with the beautiful burden of loving deeply, and I take no shame in that. If you have seen or read The Giver, you have seen the perfect depiction of the way that opening your heart to feel can occasionally mean pain…and I’m not prophesying negativity- it’s just the brutal truth that if you walk through life on planet earth, you’re going to experience bruises.
Recently, a friend imparted their opinion to me on emotions: “Sara, you can choose not to be hurt.”
This wasn’t a new idea to me, but it was still something to chew on. There is a degree to which I am in absolute agreement with that statement. I believe that their are few things more crippling than sitting in a victim mindset.
On the other hand, I think it’s important to acknowledge that a hurt happened and to allow it to process through. If we don’t allow hurts and losses to be tended to, we just stuff it down and become hardened.
Pope John Paul II said, “It’s better to cry than to be angry, because anger hurts others, while tears flow silently through the soul and cleanses the heart.”
Didn’t Jesus weep? There’s even a whole verse dedicated to it: “Jesus wept.” If you’ve never memorized a verse, you have now.
Jesus is the embodiment of joy and freedom, and he wept! In fact, oftentimes in the process of the grieving, there are miracles. Before Jesus multiplied the bread, he had to break it. A brilliant woman named Christine Caine pointed out that miracles are in the breaking.
I promise that God wants healing. Whenever someone asked Jesus if it was His will for them to be healed, never once did he tell them to talk to the hand.
As if. He set them free, and I’m not talking about some people’s ideas of “free” where you say you have freedom from it, but you don’t actually believe it’s a possibility and you own it as your struggle for the rest of your life. Jesus never said to the leper, “Sure I heal, but you live in a fallen world, so the disease will pop up for the rest of your life. May the odds be ever in your favor.”
That thought aside, before your healing had manifested, through the bleeding and the weeping and the processing, we bond, and we see new forms of glory. Sometimes God heals instantly, but other times, he’ll ask people to be dipped in the water seven times, but they are fully healed either way.
This year, I’m leaving a lot of people and things I love behind. There are so many beloved friends, kids that will grow and change so much, the best city in the world, and one person that I’ve had to say goodbye to over and over again for years but nevertheless the pain is the same in that every time.
I left my sweet Chattanooga with my feet ready to walk forward, and my fists white-knuckled around a life I love. From Chattanooga to Atlanta, I wept, because I was leaving things behind, and it’s hard. That’s a real thing, and to be honest, there’s a loss that happened even the morning that I drove down that my heart is still not at peace with.
Then I get here to launch in Atlanta where we are training for a few days before we fly out. I’ve been sitting here in hours of seminars about how to communicate well and how to not be an obnoxious American and how to not be a target to get kidnapped, etc. All of these people are ready to dive in full throttle into these eleven months.
I sat among the people worried that if I didn’t have everything resolved- if I was still processing, how was I going to pour out on the field?
Then, in the midst of all of the seminars, two powerful women came up to speak about sharing our raw stories with the ones we’re ministering to even if we still feel shame about it- even if we are still hurting over it but have hope that we will indeed be healed.
Then somewhere in our stories, there are connections and similarities where we go from being foreign strangers to brothers and sister, and we form a team and come against the challenges together pushing each other toward freedom.
As of today, I have a new prayer for this year, and it’s that I may weep with new brothers and sisters. Yes, I want joy and fun and celebration, but I want to walk beside people with similar experiences that unite all of us together.
Maybe some of these countries will have ice cream and Pat Benetar.
