“You are lucky it was not her heart. The heart is not so easily fixed. But the head can be persuaded.”
– Frozen
It was a rainy day in Washington. And that may sound obvious. But this was eastern Washington, the dry part of the state. And rain was much rarer here. But it was just as well. The rain matched her mood. Sarah settled into her dorm room with a cup of tea, waiting for her roommate to come home. It had only been a couple of hours since her longtime boyfriend, Justin, had dumped her. The sobbing had stopped, but her breathing was still erratic. As she waited for the door to open, she felt all the sorrow growing and getting ready to spill out again. Retelling the story to her roommate Amy, her closest friend, was sure to bring the long crying jags back. But she had to get it out.
Finally, the key turned. And as soon as the door opened, the story started pouring out. Amy looked genuinely shocked. Bewildered even. She sat down with her friend and listened for a while. But she didn’t let herself fall to her usual depth of empathy. Instead, she held back and listened. At one point she even looked around nervously, as if trying to find her bearings. Amy had some news of her own.
Eventually, they had talked through the worst of the breakup and it was Amy’s turn to share her news. “I’m moving out.” Those three blunt words hung in the air and seemed to fill up all the space in the room. Amy tried to steady her breathing. She was filled with fear. Sarah slowly realized she had only survived the first breakup. The second one eclipsed the first completely. She needed space, she needed air. She needed a break from wave after wave of crushing news. “Get out!” was all she could manage. And with that, Amy picked up pre-packed suitcase and left.
The room felt so empty. The sorrow wanted to grow into rage. It took everything within Sarah to make it through the next few weeks. The abandonment, the timing of it all….everything stung. The loss of the friendship demanded a whole grieving process.
This is one of my own stories. As Jackson mentions, we all experience a javelin thrown at us from the hands of a loved one at some point in our lives. And the experience will transform us. But in order to make sure it transforms us in the right way, we have to be brave enough to walk through the depth of all of the feelings. This can be so much easier said than done. I know many people who seem to be happy, even jovial, functional members of society. They never seem to lose their cool. And you might think they’ve never been through a betrayal or a tragedy. But then you find out with time that unpleasant feelings were unwelcome in the home they grew up in, and they never figured out a new strategy. Or they may have been to a church that mistook misfortune for God’s judgement. No matter how it happens, it can sometimes take a huge leap of bravery and a close friend to pull you through.
It is so easy to numb out, and to think if you keep your head down, you can just withstand the sandstorm, and when it is all clear, you can go back to your regular life. But the last thing God wants to do is waste the pain that you’ve been through. He wants to use it to build your empathy for others, to teach you something you can pay forward, and to build it into your leadership D.N.A. Even if you are only leading within the boundaries of your own household (arguably the most important leadership position of all). And He wants to give you the gift of forgiveness rather than the satisfaction of revenge. After all, we have all had our moments of being Amy instead of Sarah. And in this story, I was.