my little blurbs of life

My dearest twenty-one year old girl,

This letter may come as a hurtful surprise to you, but please, keep reading.  I know that right now you don’t understand boundaries between a man and a woman.  You’re not even sure yet why, when and how they exist.  And right now you’re naive to the fact that in friendships, emotions and pasts and physical touch can be confusing and messy and lead down hurtful roads.  You’re a “guy’s girl”.  We all know one—the kind of girl who thinks that most women on this earth except for her are catty and jealous and can’t be trusted.

There’s a reason why, right now, I’m referring to you as a “girl”.

There is an unhealthy balance in seeking out more friendships with the opposite sex than your own.  Let’s be honest—guys and girls were made opposite sexes for a reason, and it wasn’t to just be friends.  Is it possible to maintain friendships with each other? Absolutely.  But we should learn our limits in those friendships, especially in those crucial teens and twenties when we are figuring out ourselves and the world around us.

Darling—no man, no matter how good of a friend he is to you, should be the one you confide in about all the turbulent places this world will take your sweet heart and mind.  He cannot be your validation when your self-esteem has been challenged, and he will not be able to speak into those inherent longings inside you that only a woman would understand.  Remember that who you need to be filled with is the One who made you, not the one standing in front of you. 

While you are not responsible for the choice a man makes to lust, don’t intentionally drive a man in your life to do so.  And if you find out he is struggling, don’t bring him down or punish him.  Encourage him to seek help and show him grace.

That guy you’re talking to whose heart is wrapped up in or committed to someone else?  Take a step away, love.  Offering parts of yourself to someone who can’t offer anything back will only hurt you in the long run.  It is not up to you to change his heart.

Be wary of what you post online and how much of yourself you’re letting the world in on for free.  Those photos of yourself and the guys you’re with do not do justice to the heart beating inside of you.  Think of everything you want to give your future husband and don’t give those things away to people who aren’t him.  When you meet that man who you want to spend the rest of your life with, you’ll want him to trust you with other guys and know he is getting all of you.

Now here’s one you’re really not going to want to hear— If one of you in an opposite sex friendship is dating someone, don’t spend ample time alone with each other.  And don’t seek out the wrong kind of relationship advice from your opposite sex friends.  You know the type—when you really only want to hear what will validate you and not what is best for everyone involved. 

Love your brothers as Christ would—equally and unconditionally.  Respect their hearts and the place they are in, but show the same care and give the same encouragement to all.

If one of your friends is struggling, walk with him in encouragement, love, and lack of judgment, but also direct your friend to mentors, counselors and disciplers who have the wisdom and experience to establish long-term help.

Recognize spiritual warfare in one another and pray against it.  Fight for each other’s hearts in Christ.

Seek out other ladies.  Surround yourself with strong women who have been there and done that, or who can speak true feminine wisdom into this season of your life.  Don’t boast in “men just understanding you better.”  Men and women were not created with the same hearts.  Cherish the femininity in yours and find good women to share it with.

And remember that you are worth so much more than what you’ve already lost.  Your God is the Father of redemption, and you are one of His delivered.  Let your friendships with the men in your life reflect that always.

Love,

Yourself, four years wiser

–

Sometimes a patient just talks for an hour, and I say two sentences, and that’s the whole visit. The patient usually says, “Thank you so much for your wisdom and advice” — and I hardly said a word.

Maybe that’s a good thing. If I had said too much, I might have messed it up.

But more than that: some patients just want an ear to listen.

I’ve seen the same thing at the homeless ministry. I ask someone, “How are you?” — and the answer is a breathless forty-five minute life-story of financial collapse and arrests and rehab and failed job interviews, and at the end, “You’re so wise, now I’m so pumped up for life.”

From the homeless to the hospital, I see the same craving:

People want to be heard. Because we want significance. Meaning. Dignity. A voice.

Nobody wants to live in a vacuum of silent solitude. If we can tell even one stranger about what we’ve gone through: it brings value to everything we’ve gone through.

I ask a patient, “How are you?” and she tells me about her thirty-seven surgeries, every detail of every doctor’s prognosis and prescriptions and specific slices of the scalpel. Each surgery is a harrowing tale of uncertainty—"Will I wake up from this one?“—and I could only nod and sit inside the sorrow.

I ask a patient, “How are you?” and he tells me about his successful global enterprise in the Middle East and all the countries he’s visited and how he hates retirement and he’s too sick to work but he’s just healthy enough to miss working, and I could only agree with his longing.

I ask a patient, “How are you?” and she tells me, “I miss my dog, and I guess my husband,” and she tells me about her dog and all the tricks he can’t do and how she can probably train her husband to train the dog, and at the end I prayed mostly for her dog.

I ask a patient, “How are you?” and she’s so scared about an upcoming surgery, which might finally give her relief from a feeding tube so she can eat normally for the first time in five years, and she wants so badly for the surgery to work, and she describes what it’s like to live off this plastic tentacle sticking out the side of her stomach, and I could only weep with her as she fights hard not to weep.

Some patients don’t want to talk and it takes a delicate navigation through the shallow river into the stirring deep, to open a clamshell with thumbnails: but other patients suddenly bust open, because who else will ever get to hear their story? It’s important to them, and it’s important to talk about it, and talking about it brings some kind of solidifying power, like the ground is coming together underneath a precarious balance, and if it’s important to them, then it has to be important to me, too. And it is.

There was one patient who didn’t want to say anything. I tried to ask questions from various angles, using all the training I could muster, all that spiritual assessment stuff, and it just wasn’t working. He was quite the clamshell, I mean the barnacles and super glue kind.

In my mind, I was giving up and moving towards prayer, because he was listed as a Christian and it was a Hail Mary shot across full court.

I asked, “What would you like to pray about?” — and he talked about his mother, and how lonely and scared she must be at home without him, and then he started weeping like crazy and he talked about his mother’s health and her surgery and how she was visiting the hospital even though she was so sick, and his mother was his big giant important pearl inside, so we prayed for her, and he talked about her some more after that, and that’s the thing he needed someone else to hear.

It can take a long time to get there, but it’s there. We can give a voice to it.