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Juice and Graham Crackers

September 3, 2020 / 11 Comments

“Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.”

David Augsburger, Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard

I have, fortunately for me, a couple of friends who are listeners. I know they’ve heard me when they follow through with questions and comments appropriate to what I’ve told them. Much later, even, when we speak, they’ll ask me about situations/people/relationships/fears/joys I’ve shared with them. These friends are invaluable to me because they have connected themselves by their hearts to my heart, the part of myself I guard most closely and am most protective of. It is, after all, so very easily harmed.

This world has been, since nearly the beginning, cold and hard and very, very arduous to move around in. Without having someone that we know loves us, cares about us, it’s infinitely more difficult yet. Some of you know this by sad personal experience.

One of our responsibilities as members of humanity is to take care of one another. God loves us. God certainly is always available to us. For sure God is the very best and most effectual listener of all. But we humans are who are present in the flesh and are looking one another directly in the eye. We humans are the ones sitting knee-to-knee with nothing between during the difficult, confusing, painful times, as well as the joyful and pleasurable ones. And we humans are, or should be, God with skin on, as they say, for one another.

Anne Lamott, one of my favorite authors, says this in her book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith: Our preacher . . . said recently that this is life’s nature: that lives and hearts get broken – those of people we love, those of people we’ve never met. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the (H)ealer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers.”

You sit with people. You listen to them. Really listen. That’s how you show you care. That’s how they know you love them. You do what you can. And when it’s your turn; when you yourself are in need – look around for the listeners. They’ll be the ones with juice and graham crackers. They’ll be looking for you.

 

 

 

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