Pain Pain Pain | People People People

I cried an entire two hours with leftover tears to spill on the drive back home, later that evening, and into the next day – an unprecedented sadness fortified by acts of courage thrown back in my face again and again and again. “Every time I get back up,” I’d explained to a friend, sitting in her kitchen, exasperated and holding a bowl of microwaved leftovers, “I get pushed back down. It’s endless.”

A year and a half later, hands and knees pressed against my own kitchen floor, I watched my tears soak the dark wood panels, completely empty of the courage to get back up again.

Pain. Pain. Pain.

“Stop calling people toxic and start calling them unhealthy” – a thought that recently collided into my consciousness while minding my own business. Curious, I leaned in.

“It’s not about the definition of the word but about what it does in you. Calling someone toxic engages your heart in anger and disgust. ‘Unhealthy’ engages compassion because ‘unhealthy’ is a relatable part of the human experience. ‘Toxic’ says victim and villain. ‘Unhealthy’ says human and human.”

Life makes more sense when we calculate our stories in victims and villains, particularly when we write the script. An unmistakable distinction between good and evil embroidered with self-interpreted nuances authorizes an equally impenetrable conclusion that our enemies are God’s enemies, not the other way around.

I believe in good and evil and right and wrong. Yet I’m equally convinced that sometimes things are not wrong, they’re just different, and different is uncomfortable, especially when it hurts our feelings.

While I’ve both been wronged and done wrong, my own guilt does not nullify the pain of my external afflictions. An eye for an eye may equal the playing field so long as we’re satisfied playing in a field of ruins.

That evening I spent in my friend’s kitchen and later in mine was a pivotal low point in my life - a sort of rock bottom, if you will. A lot of things had brought me there. Things done by others and things I had done all on my own, scattered around me in pieces, a part of this wreckage I now owned. Yet rock bottom is as much a state of complete loss as it is a clean slate to begin again.

If pain breaks us, then it is compassion that puts as back together, or, at the very least, begins the process. Compassion removes the villain’s mask, unveiling a creature we soon realize is not too unlike ourselves. Henry Longfellow expounds, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

People. People. People.

Pain and people - when repeated individually, a Brené Brown mantra I’ve used to feel the hurt, the disappointment, embarrassment, or frustration before trading in the individualistic culture of our day for one that remembers it is not about me but about us.

I think we largely overlook the significance that out of all the things God could have declared as most important, He held loving our neighbor as ourself as high as loving Him. A true understanding of God’s character makes Him easily worth our love. A true understanding of our own lives and character makes it easy to bestow grace upon our lack because of what has been done to us and where we are growing from. Why then, should we not bestow that same grace and understanding upon others, even when their unhealed sorrows and sufferings have caused us our own?

It is not about you or me. It is about us – because it is about God.

“Give me eyes to see that You are the person in front of me who is hungry, gracious Lord. When I fail to see my neighbor as myself, cure my blindness. When I fail to hear You voice when a friend is speaking from their brokenness, give me ears to hear. When I can’t feel empathy for the stranger who is afraid, kindle my heart to comfort. In all things, mold me to be more compassionate as a follower of Your ways. Remind me again that in loving one another, we all find our way to You.” – a prayer I pulled from a book I don’t remember that quoted someone else who I also can’t remember but it wasn’t me.