When the cat lashes out {because she’s a grumpy old lady} and bites my ten-year-old, Hope, she just frowns and says, “Hey! What did I do to you?”
Her hand slides down the fur of her back and she soothes her little friend. “You don’t need to bite me. It’s okay.”
When the horse gets spooked by the workers cutting down the vines in the bushes near the arena {hack, hack, rustle} the mustang thinks it’s a predator and jumps. My ten-year-old flies off his back {this isn’t nearly her first fall} and she tumbles into the sand on her hip and elbow.
She’s spooked too but forehead to forehead she calms him. “Hey, it’s okay. Nothing’s going to hurt you. You don’t need to be scared.”
She isn’t angry she’s fallen on her rear end in the dirt or that her finger stings after the cat’s nipped her. She’s barely irritated.
She takes nothing personal. At least not from animals.
I take everything personal, on the other hand.
My six-year-old kicks me in bed for the 5th time while I’m trying to type type type this blog post and I get irritated. They are watching a movie on this summer morning and I’m trying to work with my laptop in my pajamas next to them. We are all piled in my bed. There is kicking and wiggling and moving and everything but watching the movie and I’m just trying to work! Multi-tasking is a fallacy.
I take it personally when the mom on her phone in the car cuts me off and almost hits my van bumper at 40 miles an hour. I take it personally when the friend I’ve been close to for two decades goes on vacation for several weeks and I don’t hear from her at all. I take it personally when my husband forgets to take out the trash before he goes to work.
I internalize all of it.
I worry about all the things I cannot control, all the ways people hurt, and all the ways that it might be about me. Even the big things, the REAL things that people do to wound {going way beyond a scared horse dropping a ten-year-old}, and I take them in, run them around in my head and feel so personally offended.
But it’s not about me. It’s never about me.
It was only about one Person ever. And He took it all personal so that we didn’t have to.
He has taken all the wounds ever, all the hurts and snubs and dislocated injuries and He has wound them up in Him and turned them back out smothered in grace.
He understands that the anger and the sarcasm and the cruelty is because of fear. He knows that the big hurts are there because, deep down, someone is very, very scared.
He stands forehead to forehead with us, with the wounders and the wounded, speaks quiet words {even after He Himself has been wounded} and says, “It’s okay. You don’t have to be scared.”
I LOVE THIS. LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS POST.
I can so identify and needed to read this. Thank you, Sarah. I love you.
thank you dear friend!!
This is incredibly beautiful and I love your daughters heart attitude and oh how we all can learn from the children.
Perhaps that is why Jesus said ‘unless you come as (like) a child you cannot’ because he knew we would over analyze and mess it all up. love the writing.
yes. i learn so much from them every day!
These have been my words to live by this past year: It’s not about me, but all about Him. Love that you wrote this!
praise God this is true. Thanks for speaking His heart to us today.
Sarah you words are always a gift.
Hi Sarah, I’m knew to your blog. I actually found you through Allume as I was checking out the speaker list. When I read your about me page I fully got you. I’m intense and short on friends because of that….oh, and I live in So. California! Where are you located? I’m in Ontario just near the airport as the planes fly over my house at 3am! I’m thrilled to have come across another blogger in this area for it seems like all of them are back east.
*new!
I needed this today. Thx for the reminder my love
Wow, definitely needed this reminder…
Beautiful post. It is so true we often forget to live wth compassion and beyond our fears. God is always in control and we must always lean on Him.
I certainly hold a gold card to the club of “personal takers.” I must say that I have gotten much better over the years, especially this last year and a half. This week I found myself internalizing some things this week as it pertained to a post I wrote. Three weeks ago I had dinner with the woman my husband had an affair with and wrote about it as only I could, through my lens. It was our first time to mmet. I poured myself into this story feeling God guide every word of it. I did however find myself internalizing how she took it. I was offended that I had not heard from her with reaction. Silly I know, but I am in process. Glad I am not the only one. We all are in process, but I find it wonderful how quickly these days, just as you expressed, we are reminded who is in control. So refreshing…
Beautiful. Thank you, Sarah.