Bravery: In Difficult Relationships
Woven together, stitch by stitch, we are bound to one another. Our fractured pieces of cut up fabric, side by side in row upon rows. We are locked in a pattern we cannot depict. Yet we are pulled taut with pressure and preconceptions of one another and our stitches are loosening and ends are frayed. We are unable to make sense of our incompatibility for we cannot even express the difference in our weaves. We’ve tried in our own ways to understand where one of us ends and the other begins, to understand what pattern we ought to display. But all for naught. We have only served to add more layers of fear, insecurity and pain. We do not understand each other nor can we fully see each other, and cannot fathom how we are being formed together.
This is a painful place to be, here with you. Deeply connected by time and circumstance but growing further apart even while being bound tightly together. Oddly enough, it is love that brought us here in the first place. It is love that stitched us, it is love that holds us, it is love that keeps remaking us. Yet here we are, in an inescapable war with one another.
I want to be brave here, in this place with you. I want to allow the stitch ripper to rip us apart and re-sew us back together. I want to fight for this work to be complete, for the vision of what we could be. But it’s not just up to me. We are both here on this sewing table, neither of us really being heard nor being able to speak. What will it take to mend us and complete the picture being displayed in us? What will it take to allow the artist to weave these broken pieces of us together? What will it take for us to hope again, for that which we can only dream of?
Beauty is all that awaits, if we can only hold on a little longer, in this process. If we can only grieve what has been and embrace what we’re becoming. The masterpiece maker is fitting all our broken pieces together in harmony and pattern. But it requires holes in me and holes in you, piercing pain and openness to the love that is trying to weave its way through us both. We grieve as we give, we lose as we love, we sacrifice our right to be understood- to understand.
May it be so, that He can mend us.May it be so.In the meantime I am still here, brave in this moment to hold on a bit longer and wait for His work to be made complete in us. Be brave with me awhile, bear the pain with me awhile, be here with me a little longer and we might yet see what we can become.
What does it mean for you to be brave in a difficult relationship you have, today?
