What Love Requires of Us
I sit in this small group each week, to stay tethered to something. Because it feels more intimate than church; bigger than my own thoughts and theology.
We close group this week and every week by opening the floor for prayer requests. We write each person's request on a notepad and forget about each one and the notepad before we leave this circle tonight.
Just as we end, there is one last girl that begins to share. Except instead of sharing her request, she begins to cry. It was quiet & soft-like an accident. All of our faces are on her as she works through tears to piece together words. She hopes these words will make her tears make sense to all of us. She is holding back about the deep hurt that has left her here: in this circle, unable to preform as the put-together person that she meant to be. She starts to tell us how this pain has changed her, how it has changed God for her. Her words came together slowly and the tears fast and unrelenting. The emotion she feels steals her breath. She isn’t here to make a request. She is here for relief. She can’t keep herself together anymore, she can’t have the faith they are talking about. So she empties herself out on this couch.
Her pain starts spilling out into the circle we sit in. The least I can do here is stay locked in with her; to carry, to feel, to imagine, the pain she is sharing with us. To sit in this with her, and go nowhere else. I think to myself, that there is nowhere else more important I go.
Just as her words start coming together, the girl who leads this circle stops her mid sentence to say “I am sorry, can we just stop right here and pray for you right now?”. Everyone follows suit quickly by closing their eyes and positioning their heads low.
Her eyes are open now, glued to the coaster on the coffee table that we are all gathered around. I watch as she becomes emotionless. They pray for her to try harder while her eyes stay on the coaster.
The prayer ends and the girl leading this circle thanks her for sharing and moves along, asking for any other requests.
It settles over me that this prayer was not for the girl with the tears, it was for the girl leading the circle. All of us, too busy silencing our own discomfort, halting it with a prayer, that we missed it. We sent her off with our hopes and advice and prayers to a God she was struggling to believe is even good. We left her with all of those things and none of what she needed. Her pain did not disrupt our tidy lives.
It’s like when I found myself in a church bathroom with a girl who had just said the truth out loud for the first time. I am wearing my new, favorite white shirt and watching as her mascara melts off of her on to my shirt. I have nothing to give her, only my shoulder and my staying here.
I hold her tight. I don’t use this time to direct or advise her. I don’t decide things about her heartbreak. I don’t say things like “everything happens for a reason” because I have no reason to offer. People on bathroom floors rarely need thoughts or opinions anyway. I have no answers. I am only as shellshocked and broken as she is, because I am. She didn’t need my prayers that night, she needed someone to care-so she can start to believe that maybe there is a God that cares too.
The shirt I wore that night is still stained with her mascara. I stopped trying to get the stain out. I like to think the hardwood floor where my first tears of relief fell is still stained too.
May we find the messy work of love our highest calling; the love that leaves stains in our shirts, interrupts our tidy lives, and leaves us never the same.
Logan Burgess