The hidden gift within our hardest relationships ...

the monthly letter

Long before this cancel culture, we canceled in secret.

We moved on. We whispered “bless their heart” (curses) and changed our schedules to avoid those who made us feel uncomfortable. We recycled conversations with our adversaries in our heads, creating a case against them.

But under all that seething, steaming, bubbling-up-and-over anger wasn’t just anger.

It was hurt.

The kind of hurt that cripples a heart. The type of hurt that makes one want to cancel.

Sticks and stones aren’t as bad as names. I’d take a club to my knee any day over the secret name-calling that I’ve both heard and learned were spoken of me.

You see, I’m confident that I’ve also been the name-caller, the “bless their heart” cursor — the one who slandered so subtly that you wouldn’t know the force of my accusations, but instead might just side with me.

Easier for me to detect, though, are the feelings that rise when I’m on the receiving end.

I vividly remember how my mouth went dry when reading an accusation of me, how my throat closed when I was slandered, how I coiled inside when I fielded a snickering joke about me. I can still smell the air and see the scene around me for each of these.

I see them much more than I remember how I might have been one delivering the canceling.

I wonder if you can, too?

Can you put yourself back there: in the place where you learned what a trusted friend had said behind your back … when you heard a family member cancel you with their accusations — cloaked as declarations about your character and your intentions.

Deep relationships are laced with such moments.

We both receive and we deliver pain, and sometimes it seems that even the most well-deployed conflict resolution strategies will never resolve a rift. “What do you do?” then, is not the question I propose to you. Instead, I invite you into the question I’ve been asking myself and God for over a decade: 

What do You want to reach in me through this, God?

We live in an angry world — one in which anger doesn’t usually begin as mere anger. Anger germinates from a seed of hurt, of pain untended, of ache not brought before God. And those seeds, they grow. They grow from little-girl hurt to big-girl fiery rage. They grow from tears smattering our cheeks like first drops of rain on our windshield to a deluge—a downpour. Few think clearly during the surge. The umbrella is useless.

So many of us are underwater in our relationships. We are drenched in our pain and their pain and the pain that caused them to react to us with pain and the pain we’re also creating in our spheres of interaction — stemming from the initial source of pain.

So we cancel. We move on. We whisper “bless their heart” curses and change our schedules to avoid those who make us feel uncomfortable. Or we have dozens of staged conversations in our minds that never go anywhere and never take us anywhere.

And a culture is birthed — one that was there all along, but dormant, in our hearts.

All the while … God is kneeling on hard ground, the tip of his finger sketching letters in the dirt, drawing our attention away from the conflict and back to the heart where all of this started.

The stones … the name-calling … there’s a story that predates them.

When I was a young bride, Nate and I began fielding accusations from a person I expected to be safe. Over a decade, the accusations ebbed and flowed. Just when I expected the vaporous nature of time to heal the relationship, this person’s words, like a cudgel, leveled me. We worked many angles to bring healing to this fractured relationship. We wrote letters, we made phone calls, offered gifts, invited others' input and counsel. But sometimes, even our best efforts fall flat in mending that which predated us.

I didn’t know that this wouldn’t be the first person to wield words like a weapon against my heart.

What I won’t detail here is the reality that I’ve faced other close relationships that brought unrelenting accusations — the worst kind, the ones that have just enough of an inkling truth to make you coil on the inside … accusations that make you spend hours doubting yourself and God in you.

For years I created a defense case. Of course, I rarely said it aloud but nurtured the case against these accusers in my thoughts — waking and sleeping.

Nothing was moving this. Nothing was shifting this — not healthy conflict resolution, not verbal processing, not seething case-building.

In a this-isn’t-changing-so-how-am-I-going-to-survive exasperated moment — I finally asked what do you want to reach in me, God? and here’s what I heard:

In a discreet whisper, I heard the patient, longsuffering diction of the Lord. Almost like a drumbeat — or rather, was it a heartbeat? — steadying me not just with what He said but with who He is, so near to me.

Not exasperated, not reaching to quiet my pain, but seeing me … knowing me … in it.

“The Lord is compassionate and merciful, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love.” (Psalm 103:8)

Oh, the contrast with my thoughts.

His steady love settling me versus my anxious grasp for the approval of my accusers exhausting me, wounding me with hopelessness, leaving me spent and angry.

If their accusations weren’t so pointed, you see, I probably could live with them. I’d work around them. I’d give my accusers a “bless their heart” curse and write them off. But because of their direct nature, piercing what I care about most, my only shield was Another Voice.

I know I’m not alone. In this angry world, our accusers grow. Hurt, untended, can make us ones who hurt — and so our hurting world just goes on hurting.

But you, like me, creating the case in your mind — fantasizing about retribution and canceling your enemies in secret — perhaps need the suggestion to pause. Perhaps we step off the four-lane highway for just a moment and walk together down the dusty footpath towards Him and ask:

God, what do you want to reach in me as I stand accused?

I suspect that instead of a plan of action, you might hear an intonation.

A lilt in His voice.

You might experience the way that He leans … in and not away.

I’m growing more convinced that the strategy for the brewing anger around us isn’t to fight fire with fire, but instead to tuck away … to listen for the lilt.

To be held.

His answer to my question — God, what do you want to reach in me as I stand accused? — is unfolding in my life as accusation ebbs and flows. But the summary goes something like this:

I want to reach the little girl who doesn’t know that the greatest need of her life is to be held in the face of her enemies. 

[I’m not sure if you know that I write weekly, and sometimes multiple times a week, on topics like this one. And during creative seasons, like summer, I also send videos I’ve recorded with Nate 😉. If you’re interested in learning more about this more private —and, thus, more candid — writing space, you can read about it here.]

Until next month,

Sara