Relationships are a mystery ever-still unfolding for me. I’m no expert — unless my many and varied mistakes form expertise. I remember the friend who, years ago, graciously told me that when she came to me to share something hard in her life, I would often have a word of advice.
“You remind me of my mom,” she said. “It was too hard for her to sit in my pain with me … and after a while, I stopped confiding in her.”
This candor was a gift to me. I can recall a dozen conversations over the years when I was that advice recipient. I came with an ache and was given an answer.
Lest you shame yourself, wondering if your responses to your friends are like mine were to my friend, I ask you to think bigger: I wonder if my responses to my friend were more revelatory of my lack of understanding of His patience with the small things in my life, than they were merely a friendship foot fault.
These days I’m finding that when I experience Him in the small of my life — more and more still — I have a tenderness for the seemingly insignificant moments in another’s life. I can listen longer without giving advice — less convinced I have the answer to change them. I can sit with the tension in their heart, knowing that He is the pursuer — that it’s not my job as a friend or spouse or mom to move them along a spectrum towards joy.
{This is easier typed than lived, friends.}
