Ten

How to Passionately Love
When Your Heart’s Breaking

Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.

GEORGE MACDONALD

Go ahead and ask your mother—ask any mother.

Love is a willingness to suffer.

So I’m more than a little mangled and frayed before I drive our limp rag doll girl into town to see the doctor. Our youngest has packed this fever for five days straight. I’m worried and worn a bit thin and why in the world does loving someone always make you feel so vulnerable? Love pries open your chest and pulls open the door of your heart so someone can walk right in and make this mess that remakes you into something more beautiful.

Shalom leans on me in the doctor’s parking lot. And the moment I lock the van door behind us, I know exactly what I’ve done. I can see the keys’ mocking little gleam right there on the seat, all saucy and smug. Brilliant, Sherlock. You’ve got a little girl with a fever of 103 and she’s finding it hard to stand, and you’ve just locked the rather important keys in the vehicle. Mother of the Year Award right here.

And to top it all off? I haven’t got my phone on me either.

Yeah, alrighty. Sick kid barnacled to my leg like an outgrowth, we get into the doctor’s office and I call home, only to get Malakai. Shalom leans hard against me, her face burning like a torch.

I attempt to explain myself, watching the receptionist bite her lip. “Uh, so yeah—can you send one of your brothers with the spare set of keys?” My cheeks feel some heat of their own.

“Okaaaay.” I can hear riffling on the other end of the line. “Okay, yep, got a set of the spare keys.” I can hear their jangle teasing. “Will tell the big boys. Somebody will be there soon, Mama.”

“Thank you. Love you. And don’t forget about us! We need those keys to get home.”

I barely get it out before the kid hangs up, and we’re left at the mercy of a house of boys and a set of keys just a perfect seven minutes from town.

Shalom and I wait an hour and thirteen minutes to see the overworked doctor. And for every one of those minutes, I’m either glancing at the clock or glued to the window looking out over the parking lot.

C’mon, boys. Shalom sprawls across me with the limpness of an exploded water balloon.

By the time the doctor sees us, takes her temperature, swabs her throat, tells her not to wretch while he drills another swab down her gagging throat, pokes a flashlight into her ears, pats down her lymph nodes like a TSA agent, tells us to wait . . . and we wait . . . and comes back with this scrawled-out prescription, we’ve burned up, oh, another twenty-three minutes and I’m thinking I don’t need to call home again, for sure, they’ll be here by now.

When we drag out to the van, we’re the last ones out of the office, and the nurse closes the doors behind us. Locking them with her own set of keys and smiling thinly with her very own phone there on the desk behind her. And yeah, I’m just fool enough to believe one of the boys will be sitting there, swinging a set of keys from one blessed little finger.

No dice. The parking lot’s empty.

I’m stranded with an inferno child, only seven minutes from home, and I called nearly an hour and forty-three minutes ago. And they know I’m at the doctor’s office and not here getting my toenails painted pretty, for crying out loud.

And there it is—I’m the abandoned kid again, stranded for hours after school in the deepening cold, forgotten and pacing and waiting. The kid at the kitchen window looking out into the dark, waiting for headlights, for someone to come home. The kid abandoned for months at a time because of adults’ debilitating mental health, left to deal with meals and laundry and a kid brother and sister alone. Is there anything quite as terrifying as being forgotten? Because no one is really dead when obituaries are read or headstones are bought or flowers are brought to the grave; death only happens when one is forgotten.

Okay, c’mon now. You’ve got a sick kid counting on you here. And you’ve got at least a couple older kids who can help you—kids deemed by the government old enough to drive, but obviously not possessing the functional cortexes to actually remember their mother.

Do they even have phone booths in this farm town anymore? Mental checklist: the one by the pharmacy is gone, the one by Mac’s Milk, the one on Main across from the hardware store? Shalom’s cheek feels like a little furnace against my arm as we drag by the bank, the dollar store. Her feet are dragging like lead by the time we reach the hardware store. I find a phone booth, drop in the quarter scrounged from the bottom of my bag, punch the number. Shalom crumples right down and lies on the sidewalk.

“Hello?”

“This. Is. Your. Mother.” I choke it out, trying not to completely let out whatever pain’s strangling up my throat.

“Oh, I told the boys to come for you—honest! Okay—one of them’s coming right now. They just left. Hear the back door?”

I want to break, curl up beside Shalom on the sidewalk and bawl. What kind of parent have I been? Whose kids completely forget about them in their crisis and don’t come rescue their own mama trying to help a sick child? I feel worse than abandoned—I feel like a failure. I haven’t loved them enough to be loved back? It’s selfishness that breeds selfishness, rejection that teaches one how to reject. Only the wounded wound. How have I failed to love them? How have I shattered their hearts?

C’mon, girl. It’s teenagers and just a set of keys.

But my dramatic, overwrought, triggered self feels something far worse; I feel abandoned.

This happens: you become a parent and your internal dialogue becomes this sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde exchange. Parenting is logically complicated, theologically enlightening, and sometimes a bit psychologically destroying.

How in the name of all things good and right have I done so many things wrong? How do I hit rewind—rewind time and go back to being someone else, someone better, someone who can make them all be okay?

And my logical self tries to curl comfort around the angst of all my drama: life is less about a formula and more about faith; life is more than Good In = Good Out, but more like when God’s enough, there’s grace enough. Life can’t be about being good enough, but instead believing there is God enough—God enough for whatever our own humanity needs grace for. And there’s always that: today’s bread is enough bread, today’s grace is enough grace, today’s God is enough God. The question is, can I believe that when the suffering and the grief comes? And if I can—will it make me feel any less alone?

Shalom reaches up, pats my cheek. “One thing you can be thankful for, Mama?”

In a handful of words, the little girl hands her mama a sword: fight back the dark with doxology. I’m almost too wrung out to even grab it.

Eucharisteo. It can come like relief—doxology can detox the day. Because this is how you begin to make the ever-present Christ present. And you cannot be love until you feel you are beloved.

“You.” I squeeze her hand. “That’s what Mama’s thankful for—you.”

And though I don’t know how today’s story will end, I remember: faith thanks God in the middle of the story.

She pats my cheek like I’m some doll of hers. Some battered, shattered thing. Her hand is warm on these wounds and failures that can’t even be uttered.

When one of the boys shows up with the keys, I take them from him slowly. I know I’m overreacting and triggered, but there’s some hot lava building to let loose in my veins, my heart liquefying, and there’s no stopping it, things blurring and spilling a bit.

Turn the keys slow and easy because you’ve been here and done that and you know this: love means holding your tongue when your heart is hard. Or when it’s breaking.

MAYBE WHOLENESS
IS EMBRACING BROKENNESS
AS PART OF YOUR LIFE.

I wait, whisper it to myself, soothing, reassuring. “Love will always make you suffer. Love only asks, ‘Who am I willing to suffer for?’ ” This is the severe grace of love making me real. Real love is patient and it bites its tongue. It lets its heart be broken like bread. I had never felt it quite so viscerally before: picking up your cross feels most like patience.

I’m standing there with keys in my hand. Love, before it is anything, to be love at all, it is first patient. And I’d experienced enough to know that patience is nothing but a willingness to suffer. Patience and the word passion, they both come from the exact same root word, patior, to suffer.

Passion has much less to do with elation and much more to do with patience. Passion embraces suffering because there’s no other way to embrace love. Love isn’t about feeling good about others; love is ultimately being willing to suffer for others. First coined precisely to describe Christ going to the cross, passion originally and solely meant the “willing suffering of Christ.” Passion is what is fully expressed in that cross penned on my wrist. This one image is the exact picture He wants for a life. And His passion and His death are what He wants to share with us, give to us. “Don’t fight suffering! Join Me and embrace it!”

There is no way to avoid pain. There is no way to avoid brokenness. There is absolutely no way but a broken way.

Isn’t suffering the first thing Jesus promises us? Isn’t this how we make Christ present? “I assure you: You will weep and wail . . . You will become sorrowful.”¹

The only way to avoid brokenness is to avoid love.

Our boy standing there in front of me looks like a man now to me. How I love him—and oh, how do I love him?

You are less willing to suffer for love until you know how His love made Him suffer for you. The essence of being Christian is being about passion; the essence of being Christian is about being willing to suffer, to sacrifice, to serve, to live into givenness—for this is real love communion with God and people. And with one kid.

And if I miss that Christianity is about passionate, suffering love, I’ve missed its essence. For the love of Christ, you can dream about starting a soup kitchen or opening an orphanage or doing some world-igniting work that will usher in utopia. But someone, somewhere, sometime, is going to let you down. Someone’s not going to show up like you need them to, someone’s going to complain that you’re not fair, that you can’t do that, and somebody’s going to make it clear that you’ve got it really wrong. There are Job’s buddies in every crowd. There’s suffering around every corner, lurking in every act of love.

And if you can’t bear ingratitude from the world—you can’t bear love out into the world.

I look over at my boy looking back at me. We both look away and then try to find each other’s eyes again. And everything in me reverberates with that one thing I know again and again to be truest about love: the moment you’re most repelled by someone’s heart is when you need to draw closer to that heart.

I step toward our boy. If I touch him, will we both break and fall apart and maybe everything will start falling together?

Pick up your cross. It’s the only way you or anyone else can know a resurrection. Carry your cross so this carrying of pain makes love. It is never the cross you carry, but your resistance to the cross, that makes it a burden. Absorb the pain with a greater love—touch a shoulder. Bite your tongue. Swallow your complaint. Still your wagging finger. Let yourself be worn down to love. Let your joints grow loose with love so your hands swing easy enough to give, to break and give your struggling-to-be-willing self away.

You become real when you make every situation, every suffering, every single moment, into a way to lead you into closer communion with Christ. A broken way.

I talk slowly, words coming like an offering, like some muddled clarity bubbling up. And even before I say the words, it happens again, like it does every time. When you beg forgiveness is exactly when you remember how you’ve refused someone else forgiveness.

“Sorry—sorry, I haven’t loved you like you’ve needed, son.”

Braving his eyes lets him see my fragility. My impossibly vulnerable fragility and how I’ve failed and been failed. And it doesn’t matter if it’s the constellation of my failures, or how I’ve been triggered, I simply know, and I’m swallowing, the sourness of this mess. Do I need to own this or does he need to? Maybe all that matters is that we’re owned by Christ and Love owns us all. That cross on my wrist, it’s pointing the broken way through. It’s not just telling me what to do; it’s ultimately confirming Who is in me. Don’t we have to forgive because we are in union with Christ, who is in us, and isn’t He a forgiver? Any forgiveness is only a shadow of God’s. Anything less than forgiveness is like a Judas kiss on our own hand, a betrayal of ourselves and Christ within by ourselves.

I take my hand out of my pocket reach out to touch his shoulder. Lay my hand slowly, fully on him, like a benediction. Like a gift. A simple pocket miracle.

And I can feel it—Christ within. I can feel it a bit like a burning: no one gets to forgiveness unless something dies. There always has to be some kind of death for there to be any kind of forgiveness.

He and I stand in this vulnerable communion, a bit of the miracle to be had.

“No—I’m sorry, Mom.”

I don’t turn away from his eyes. Do you actually only love someone when you love them more than you love yourself? Do you actually only love someone if when they break your heart, you don’t hate them?

Maybe wholeness is not reaching for perfection in your life; maybe wholeness is embracing brokenness as part of your life.

And I nod at the boy, the relief of a slow smile breaking . . . and giving grace away . . . his way.

How else do you passionately love when your heart is breaking?

The next morning, I tell my sister what an absolute gong show we are over here, what a mess this really is and we are, and my sister says it to me, and I try to memorize it, how it made me feel:

“You are a velveteen mother. This is making you more beautiful.”

And I try to blink back what she messages, what’s brimming—what’s hard to believe:

“Trust Him in all this brokenness. It is a gift.”

Maybe—maybe all this fragility is somehow breaking the brokenhearted—into Real? Breaking us free?

What could happen if we all weren’t afraid of passion—of suffering?