How are we going to survive this cultural moment?

This world is coarse. Unforgiving. Fault-finding and canceling. Callous to the heart that beats behind another’s seemingly well-armed words.

And in these winter-harsh days, I find myself hovering around an ever-unfolding opposite:

God is gentle with me.

(And He likes me.)

In the weeks after one of my daughters was born, I rocked her and nursed her under the familiar cloud that sporadically dimmed my childhood days. Dread came with that cloud — foreboding darkness and fear. I was thirty-nine, and I was eight in that rocking chair, bewildered as to how I didn’t grow out of these dark days like I did the boogeyman in my closet.

Some might call it postpartum depression, and while I realize there were hormonal elements involved, these feelings were not new post-pregnancy. They were old friends … or enemies — I wasn’t quite sure. I knew the eight-year-old girl had no wherewithal to face them, but at thirty-nine, I was tired of them. Tired enough to be ready to face them. This rocking chair would be my healing place if I could just stay there long enough.

A wise counselor friend advised Nate and me together, as I shared how the dark clouds that hung-low over many childhood days and crept into seemingly random adult days had returned and weren’t leaving: let Nate run his fingers through your hair and hold you.

The suggestion: Nate could be a proxy for what I needed most from God to push the dark clouds away — both when I was eight, and when I was thirty-nine.

Now I share this with you, knowing that some of you have husbands who don't yet know how to hold you like this in your pain. Others of you have lost the husbands who did. Some of you are still single, and this is yet another reminder of what you don’t have. And some men reading this long to hold your wives in this way, but wonder if they would bristle against your touch.

The practical playing out of this advice is less important than the notion:

we heal from hurt under the gentle touch of God.

The dark clouds, the bitter winter — all those metaphors we have to put language to the cavernous ache known to every human, that has been exacerbated in the past 12 months — are subject to God’s gentleness.

Upon hearing that advice, I held that baby and I cried my tears onto her cheeks as I pictured God holding me that invasively close. I stared into her eyes and imagined God creating mine. I ran my forefinger up and down each of her tubby toes and pudgy fingers — full with her intricacies — and sunk into His thoughts about me as He made me.

God made me to mirror Him.

He liked what He made.

I can’t experience Him as gentle — truly gentle with my hiccups and my burps and my stumbling and getting back up — if I don’t think that He liked what He made in me.

I rocked that baby and nursed my heart on what was true: God likes me, and He is gentle with the eight-year-old girl who learned to run from anything that might bring those dark clouds overhead.

He rocks me. He holds me. Just like Nate did, He runs His fingers through my matted hair, knotty and bedraggled from long days of working hard to be liked.

God — my daddy: restoring fatherhood and daughterhood and sonship, one rocking chair at a time.

So when I step into this calloused, cold world that begs to be in winter forever, I know how to find warmth. I know where the heat source is.

His gentleness, friends. The unlikely source — the overlooked answer to your dark days and mine — isn’t elusive … we’re just not so familiar with Him this way.

Being held can be awkward at (now) forty-three.

And it’s keeping me alive during these days.

Join me? Don’t trust my word, search His out*. And ask Him both to hold you (yes, put your imagination to work, here) and to prove* to you through His Word that He relates to you out of His gentleness … and that He likes you.

This winter may not be as cold as you anticipate. And this process, though simple, could change a whole lot about how you endure these days.

It has for me.

With anticipation,

Sara

*Psalm 18:19, 35 | Psalm 103:13 | Psalm 145:8-9 |  Psalm 147:11 NIV | Psalm 149:4 | Isaiah 49:15-16 | Isaiah 62:5 | Jeremiah 31:3 | Lamentations 3:22-23 |  Hosea 11:8 | Zephaniah 3:17 |  Matthew 3:17 | Matthew 14:14 | John 15:9,15 |  John 17:23 | Ephesians 2:7 | Romans 2:4 NIV |  1 Timothy 1:16 |  1 Peter 5:7 NIV

PS. As you may have noticed these past few months, we’ve begun sending my monthly newsletters through a different service. If you’re interested in reading more of my writing each week and going a bit deeper into topics like this one — which we will do over here this month — check out SOAR.