Grit and Bear It

Do you know that scene from Braveheart where William Wallace turns away from his band of soldiers to face the coming onslaught, every muscle taut, letting crazy adrenaline fuel his war cry as he hurtles himself toward battle? I bet you can see his blue-streaked face now. That, to me, is THE picture of true grit.

I’ve been William Wallace for the past six years. And it’s wreaked havoc on my relationship with Reed.

Without even realizing it fully, six years ago at Reed’s diagnosis, I adopted the trite (and naive) mentality that what doesn’t kill us, will make us stronger. My Americanized sensibilities encouraged me to pull myself up by my bootstraps, put my head down and get to work, and turn my focus towards self-sufficiency. Perhaps some of my self-sufficiency grew out of a disappointment towards God for allowing this kind of situation in my life. If I couldn’t depend on God to bring good things into my life (because were there enough good things in this world to outweigh this one truly terrible thing?), then my only option was to depend on myself.

In parenting Reed, I plowed through month after month of doctor and  specialist appointments, question after unanswered question, and days and weeks of exhaustion, learning to live in our new reality of life with special needs.  Even when I was tired and felt like life wasn’t fair and just plain didn’t want to face reality, I still had to. I kept pushing through, somehow forgetting Jesus’ call to the weary to come to him for rest. I largely ignored my emotions and just kept moving. These legitimate emotions, left unattended to, did not just disappear. I just kept muscling them back down under the surface.

The problem is when we force a muscle to function the wrong way for too long,  it compensates for the added strain, performing as we’re asking it to but developing scar tissue. Similarly, months and now years of facing Reed’s challenges with grit has created emotional scar tissue because I wasn’t made to live life simply by my own resolve and courage. As the emotional muscle fatigued under the constant strain of grit, disfigured emotions formed and influenced how I interacted with Reed. Rather than a person to be loved warmly and kindly and gently in all tenderness, he became a difficulty and task to be managed. Rather than cultivating tenderness in my heart for a very special child the Lord had given me, I began growing bitterness and resentment towards him. As the scar tissue thickened around my heart, becoming numb and difficult to cut through, emotional apathy and resentment began to grow. I had to learn that my relationship with Reed is not a crisis to manage but rather a life long relationship that will thrive more through tenderness than grit.

In contrast to grit’s self-focus and self-determination, Scripture encourages us to be tender-hearted towards others.  This means being gentle, kind, affectionate, compassionate, sympathetic, warm, giving, and vulnerable. Both Peter and Paul call us to this tenderness in our relationships, and it’s a tenderness we cannot produce apart from work of the Spirit in our lives. Peter writes, “Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind,” and similarly, Paul encourages us to “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted” (ESV, 1 Peter 3:8; Ephesians 4: 31).  If we instead muscle our way through difficult circumstances with ourselves at the center, we’re like rocky soil in which it becomes difficult for new, tender growth to emerge, and ultimately our relationships suffer. Tenderness, on the other hand, enables us to  bear the image of Christ to others and learn that we don’t have to white-knuckle our way through life.

Just yesterday, I was driving to the hospital to sit with Reed who had been admitted for bilateral pneumonia, a common health complication for him. As I drove down the interstate, counting that this was probably our 11^th or 12^th hospitalization, I felt the familiar tug to just put my head down and power through, to ignore the emotions I was feeling and to think I had to bear the weight of all this on my own. But in this moment God graced me with that reminder of the importance for gentleness and compassion in this very situation: gentleness and compassion from God, through me, and for Reed.