Deeply Loved and Deeply Hurting: Seeing the Battles Others Fight in Silence

Just across the aisle sat a young woman, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old. Beside her was a loving grandmother. Across from her sat attentive parents. Her father was cracking terrible dad jokes about a “Kiss and Ride” advertisement, insisting the length of the ride should be directly proportional to the number of kisses received. Her grandfather was enthusiastically explaining how windmills worked and discussing the braking systems on the turbines. I watched this family for the better part of the thirty minute ride, and the longer I watched, the more convinced I became that none of it was for show. The warmth was real. It was the kind of scene that would make most people smile.

Yet the young woman’s arms and legs told a very different story. They were covered in scars. Hundreds of them. Some small and faint, others deep and unmistakable. It was evident this young woman had been fighting a battle for a very long time.

The bus ride ended, but my wrestling with what I had seen did not. I carried it with me the rest of the day, turning it over, trying to make some kind of sense of it. How could someone surrounded by so much love be carrying so much pain? Maybe something terrible had happened in her life. Maybe she was fighting anxiety, depression, or some other struggle I couldn’t see. Maybe her family had made mistakes, or maybe they had done everything right. The truth is, I simply don’t know, and having watched them closely enough to rule out performance, the easy explanation wasn’t available to me either.

What struck me, the more I sat with it, was how quickly we want to explain what we don’t understand. We want a cause, a culprit, a tidy conclusion, so we can move on. But life rarely works that way. The older I get, the more I realize that some people come into this world carrying burdens the rest of us can hardly comprehend. Sometimes wonderful parents have struggling children. Sometimes loving families experience heartbreak. Sometimes people who seem to have every advantage are fighting battles nobody else can see.

By evening I found myself thinking about my own grandchildren, and what I would say if she were mine. I caught myself reaching for an answer almost immediately, which is its own kind of irony, since the very thing I had just concluded was that I had no real basis to answer. But I think I would tell her three things.

That she is loved.
That whatever is hurting today will not hurt forever.
That she does not have to carry it alone.

I would encourage her to let go of whatever she could let go of, because life is hard enough without dragging yesterday’s pain into every tomorrow. And I would encourage her to step forward into life anyway, to serve, to build, to create, to do hard things, because one of the great paradoxes of life is that healing often begins when we stop focusing on ourselves and start contributing to something larger.

The family disappeared into the streets of Bruges that morning, but the lesson stayed with me all day. Every person we meet is carrying a story we cannot see. Some scars are visible. Most are not. You can be deeply loved and deeply hurting, and every one of us, somewhere, is both.

Letting Go,

Rich

Deeply Seen and Deeply Hurting: Ep 9 | Calm the Chaos with Rich Christiansen

In this episode of Calm The Chaos, I talk through that bus ride in Bruges and the three things I would say to my own grandchild if I ever found her in that place. I also share why we hang on to the things that hurt us, and, before my wife and I leave for Argentina, why we have made our health the priority and what I hope you will do about yours. Watch Here.