A few days before we moved from Connecticut, I turned on the old Charlotte's Web movie for the boys. Almost immediately a rare rush of emotion came over me. During the first few minutes, I found myself a little misty-eyed here and there.
If someone had asked what was wrong, I had an arsenal of answers ready: The animation was just so lousy! Many of the voices didn't fit the characters. The lyrics were clever but too complex.
But really, it was because it was Charlotte's Web. I've had a
special place in my heart for that book ever since I listened to a narration by E. B. White himself. For such a gentle story, it deals with some heavy topics -- Wilbur narrowly escapes death in the first two minutes of the book, and the rest of the story is about protecting him at all costs. Each time I read the book, the story strikes my heart with more force. Fern loves him. Charlotte loves him. His job is to just receive that love.
It can be hard to receive love. I felt that all throughout the move from Connecticut. Friends watched my kids when I had no chance to repay them. Friends moved boxes a day early because of the threat of a thunderstorm and came back other days to help arrange the boxes. Friends showed up to help us unpack. The night that we loaded the truck, I picked up my kids and came home to find that one friend was still there tenderly cleaning a bathroom. Everything was shining, even the pipes under the sink. I watched him for just a second before I had to turn away lest another rare rush of emotion overtook me. As I saw the bathroom transform from a mundane little closet into a sacred space, I felt a strange tugging in my heart. I looked around our empty apartment and felt the tugging even more strongly. It was as if my heart had to open up a bit to make room for all the love that we had just received. It was beautiful, but it was also uncomfortable.
It turns out that receiving love can be uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. Often it's because it just doesn't come how we expect it to. Right before the move I listened to a
podcast by Jody Moore about friendship, and one of the points she brought up is how we need to "drop the manual." We can't just have a list of expectations that we want our friends to meet in order for the friendship to stay strong.
But wait, I thought. If there aren't certain criteria met is it still a friendship? I thought of what I wanted out of friendship, especially long-distance friendship -- checking in periodically, texting me things that might make me laugh, remembering my birthday, reading some of the same books, visiting sometimes, and posting pictures of their kids on Instagram. Then I realized, those are what I consider friendship because those are things
I'm good at. But to expect those of other people transforms friendship from a delight into a chore. As John Durham Peters noted in
Speaking Into the Air,
If nothing but reciprocity governed social relations, life would be a monotonous round of quid pro quo. Social life would be a cycle of payment, rather than of gifts . . . Reciprocity, crucial as it is, needs other principles: hospitality, gift giving, forgiveness, and love. To live among others is necessarily to incur obligations; to be mortal is to be incapable of paying them all back. (pg 56)
Maybe, just as I could never pay back all the service and kindness I received, I didn't need to expect reciprocation from my friends either for my less tangible tokens of friendship. I thought of aspects of friendship that others use to connect at more intimate level that I struggle with -- hugging, social crying, and even eye contact (I'm sorrrrrrry). I've known many people to overlook my shortcomings and become my close friends. If they could do it, perhaps so could I.
So I began to look at friendship differently. Instead of secretly wishing that friends or family would reach out the way I wanted for myself or for my kids, I started to ask, "How are they showing love? How can I receive it?" I began to see not only small kindnesses everywhere but also big, foundational gifts that elicited the same kind of heart-tugging that had defined our move. When you realize just how much of it there is, it can be overwhelming to receive love.
And maybe it needs to be overwhelming sometimes. Maybe love needs to knock us down, catch us off guard, and force us to come face to face with the possibility of never paying it back. True, we might be able to pay money or babysitting back, but to be rescued in a moment of vulnerability can never be repaid. It's in moments like these that our hearts can be cracked open to the divine. In Tracy McKay's book
The Burning Point, she described her encounter with this kind of love. "I knew with a quickening of my soul that God had not forgotten me. God was reaching out to me with not one, but with a hundred different hands---beautiful, tender hands made of flesh and bone and sinew. That day my sisters' hands reached me, and were the hands of God. . . . God didn't abandon us. He cleared the space so blessings from others could overflow (pg. 256-277)."
It can be hard, uncomfortable, and overwhelming to receive love. But it is why we are here on earth -- to ultimately learn how to receive all the love God has for us. And that, as Charlotte says, "is in itself a tremendous thing."
