The Long, Slow Embrace

My husband told me that he heard you should never be the one to end a hug with your child. Always let them release the hug first.To be honest, I don’t remember the exact rationale for it, but the image of that long, patient hug has stayed with me.

Apart from hugging our children, most things that require lengthy or patient endurance will fall into categories of some version of hardship or another. And the many of us who have traveled through various hard times would likely agree that it is awfully hard to stay present and not rush to get beyond the hardship.

You know this if you have spent hours, spun into days, weeks, or months, in a hospital room alongside the bed of someone you hold dear.

You might know how the deep ache of grief and loneliness experienced through the loss of someone you love feels like falling into a deep and bottomless pit, yet you just want to crash to the bottom and find solid ground again.

Perhaps you know the difficulty of trying to turn off your brain in the middle of the night after a nightmare, or before the terrifying dawn of a new school year, a new job, maybe a move to a new city. The impossibility of this hardship leads to that of insomnia, and all you’d like is the ease of getting away from it.

We long for healing to speed its way through the hospital. We cry for the hollow parts of us to be filled again. We want to claim sleep or just wake to start a safe, new day.

The last thing we ever want to do is dwell in the hard times.

At a recent writer’s event I heard the brilliant and wise Marilyn McEntyre say that she is tired of hearing people say that they just want to get through [this difficult thing.] Instead of getting through it, she would say, we need to get into it.

When I was in 7th grade, I was terribly sick one morning, but insisted on going to school because I needed to sign up for my top choice for an upcoming Activity Day, and I had to give a Geography presentation on Egypt that day. I believed, even as a 7th grader, that I just had to get through it. It ended up being a perfectly miserable day, one that should have been spent home in bed under a comforter, with cold medicine, and chicken noodle soup.

When I finally got home, I bet you know what I did. Yes, I dropped into bed and slept for 36 hours. Long, restorative, healing sleep in a dark, quiet room, with my mom checking on me every now and again. It would have been bliss if it wasn’t so miserable.

I have a friend whose son was recently in a wakeboarding accident that caused a brain aneurysm. This dear family has spent long hours, days, and weeks in a hospital room. I can say with a certain hopefulness and gratitude, that things are going well, but it is a hard time. All of us who know this boy, this family, (or any family experiencing lengthy hospital-room-days,) we want the healing now. The wholeness. Restoration. Completeness.

Now.

And yet, the dear boy sleeps. Often.

The reality is that we can’t rush through healing. The body takes time to heal, to recover. Loss and grief are long, grueling journeys. Hard times of any kind just can’t be rushed.

Recently, a counselor described to me how depression can naturally follow a traumatic event because, in a unique way, it sets a person into that deep, quiet, necessary rest that allows us to heal and move toward restoration.

Back to the long, slow embrace that we extend to a child.
Isn’t that just what God offers us in this life filled with hardship? Isn’t our undergirding strength in all the hard things of life simply the long, slow embrace of our good, faithful God?

In his daily devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers meditates on Mark 6:45-52 when Jesus tells the disciples to get onto to the boat go across the lake to Bethsaida. During the night, a storm unleashes and the disciples are struggling in their attempt to get to the other side. Jesus goes to them, walking across the stormy waters, joins them in the boat, and calms the storm. Chambers says that, “[God’s] purpose is that I depend on Him and on His power now. If I can stay in the middle of the turmoil calm and unperplexed, that is the end of the purpose of God. God is not working toward a particular finish; His end is the process- that I see Him walking on the waves, no shore in sight, no success, no goal, just the absolute certainty that it is all right because I see Him walking on the sea.”

When life turns to struggle and hardship, exhaustion and pain, we so strongly desire to get to the other side of it that we can easily overlook what God is doing and showing us right in the middle of the tumultuous times. More so, we forget that God has not released us from the long embrace.

As hard as it is, I’m going to encourage you now to not rush through the hard times. Be present to the embrace.

If you have more time, I hope you might like this poem that came to my inbox just this morning from the poet, James Crews. It seemed like a reminder to me of God’s ever-present presence in my life.

The Pond at Sunset
I forget I have already arrived
in the life I want, and that I am
still arriving at the same time.
Last night before sunset, I paced
The edge of the dock back and forth,
afraid to take the leap. But as the sun
broke through a rip in the clouds,
strobing across the rippled pond,
the word Trust flashed in my mind
and I jumped in. Past the worn-out
desire for a better this or that, past
the fear that if I let my guard down
and just feel joy, something might go
Awry, things will fall apart. I cried out
with shock as I rose through colder
layers of water, gasping for air,
spluttering – happier than I’ve been
in weeks. The pond was my life,
and I knew I had to keep diving
deeper and deeper beneath the surface
to immerse myself in what’s already
here, and all that is to come.

Embrace photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

Bed photo by Alexander Possingham on Unsplash

Flowers photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Pond by benjamin lehman on Unsplash