The Slow Way: On Falling Short of Love
How do we live, in all our moments, learning to emulate God’s mercy?
Listen, I don’t like party small talk. I’m an Enneagram 4 and I tend to avoid shallow conversations at all costs. Tell me your deepest darkest secrets and what keeps you awake at night. I’ll tell you mine and then we can cry together. That’s my favorite party moment.
I think I used to be more fun at parties until I had kids. Maybe it’s the ache of raising humans, or those extra portions of anxiety I’ve picked up along the way. Or maybe I just never was good at parties. But I find I have a lot more fun at parties with people who aren’t parents. Small talk with parents feels especially shallow and performative. I usually brace myself for the following conversations: Work is so busy, My kids are too smart/engaged/talented for their own good, and Ugh, redoing our gorgeous living room is such a hassle! Chris has taken to describing me post-parties as “judgy,” and I guess that’s fair. I try to go into these things with a commitment to fun! I will meet new people and I will be open to their stories and I will honor the way of Jesus by looking for the divine spark inside them. And maybe I’ll dance!
That is my pep talk on the way to the Fall Festival our neighborhood pool club hosts on a Saturday night. Our big boys are watching Ace, we have two tickets for the night, where we’ll have access to food trucks and a band. This, I tell myself, is a chance to really connect with people in our town. And, seriously, I like making friends!
So when I find myself chatting with a man I haven’t met before, connecting over how we both have eight year old boys (his are twins), I do my best to warmly receive what I experience as his insecurities. He explains how he’s the primary caretaker of his kids because, as he says over and over, his wife has the better paying job. I watch his chest deflate in his body every time he says this, his arm and body movements becoming more and more jerky, like his spirit is itching to escape out from under his skin. I nod my head. I know how hard it is to be the caregiver, to feel at the mercy of your partner’s better salary, to feel unimpressive because our culture looks on childcare as less worthy than other work. I want to say something about this, something like, I see you and this feeling of insecurity. I know it must be hard.
But he moves immediately to the next round of “comfortable” topics between parents who are strangers at parties. This round: How annoying our kids are, but shucks! Don’t we love them?
This is another topic I’m not interested in. Because usually the annoying things other people’s kids do are the exact things I have spent eight years and hundreds of hours of therapy with my son to help him learn to do.
They talk my ear off! Darn kids!
Every day another practice! I mean, it’s so hard to drive them to all these sports, but you have to nourish your kids’ talents, right?
He reads so much and just leaves books everywhere!
She doesn’t even say thank you, and I’m like, “Where are your manners?!”
I’m usually pretty tough about these things. I don’t need to share with strangers that my son doesn’t speak or read, that we’re still working hard on basic skills like looking people in the eye when they say hello. That he struggles to use a fork or communicate his needs.
But as the man stands before me, awkwardly shifting his body heel to toe, heel to toe, talking about how hard it is to drive his kids to daily soccer practices, he switches gears. “And they sit there when it’s time to go somewhere just dangling their socks, staring at me like they’re clueless! I’m like, ‘You are eight years old! Put your freaking sock on!” He laughs and looks to me so I can laugh along. I try to smile. He continues: “I’m like, ‘Two year olds know how to put their socks on!’”
I think about the mornings Ace sits for me, and I hold his hands as they stretch the sock wide enough to wiggle a foot inside. I think about the fine motor strength required to hold a sock open and pull it around a foot. I think about how if this man knew anything about my life, or my eight year old son, he would be embarrassed, ashamed, or maybe he would just pity me, pity Ace.
I grab my husband’s arm beside me, asking him to help me snag something from somewhere else, disgust in my heart. Some anger too. I say goodbye, and list all my grievances to Chris while we walk toward the bathroom together. A cover band is playing Bruce Springstein songs under a tent, but all I want to do is avoid the rest of the crowd and sit by the fire pit. I leave without ever touching the dance floor, and I blame that on the music. But I don’t think it’s the music’s fault.
The next morning at church we come to our regular time of confession. As my pastor always says, confession is not a “cosmic beat down” and it’s not a shame-fest. Confession is a chance to notice how we’ve fallen short of love. I think of it sometimes as a practice of seeing the opportunities I’ve missed — to experience the people or natural world around me as God experiences them — with curiosity, with delight. Confession is a chance to open my heart again to transformation.
As soon as I close my eyes I see the man from the party, laughing about his sons and their ridiculous inability to put on their socks. I’m tempted to taste the bile of rage that swells in me, but there’s also a small voice of invitation: To notice what my anger says about my own hurt, my own fears for my child, my own longing to be known.
None of those things — my hurt, my fears, my longing — are anti-love. But the annoyance I felt for the man, the way I left the conversation before giving him the opportunity to hear my own experience as the mom of an eight-year-old—those were choices I made to cut against the grain of love. I saw this man’s obvious discomfort over being the primary caregiver for his kids, and I chose not to move toward that pain. And he covered his pain with shallow commentary, not knowing it would hurt me.
I was recently introduced to the beautiful book series Every Moment Holy, which includes three volumes of liturgies written by Douglas McKelvey, with prayers for marking not only our moments of change or need, but even our most quotidian of tasks. I ordered the first volume and was delighted when I received it in the mail and opened it to discover it includes a prayer before doing the laundry, a prayer for the ritual of morning coffee or feasting with friends, and even a prayer for the first fire pit session of the fall season. What a gift to have someone hand us beautiful words to mark our ordinary moments as sacred.
And I was even more delighted when, five days after the party, I opened my new prayer book to find a “Liturgy For Those Who Feel Awkward in Social Gatherings.”(!) Here’s a bit of the prayer:
“I would rather learn to emulate your mercies
by entering the lives of others,
affirming their dignity and worth simply
by showing interest in the details of their lives,
however awkward I might feel in the process.
Give me grace therefore, O God, to love others,
to move toward them when my instinct is to run…”
How do we live, in all our moments, learning to emulate God’s mercy? I can be frustrated with the world’s lack of care, the intrinsic ableism in all of us that allows for casual complaints about kids and their need to get with the program of typical development. But, even in that hurt I am invited to curiosity and care. To be a mercy-emulator, to practice the way of Jesus.
To see the dignity and worth of every person I encounter, pausing in my frustration long enough to show interest in the real person, made in the image of God, longing for mercy.
A Slow Practice
In her book Radical Acceptance, psychologist Tara Branch discusses the practice of “the Sacred Pause,” in which we learn to stop in middle of obsessive thoughts or anxiety, or moments of disconnect with others, and notice how we’re uncomfortable, restless, or responding to others from a place of pain.
I want us to use her idea this week in our practice. Choose a task in your day today where you can practice a sacred pause. Maybe it’s each time you go up or down the stairs. Maybe it’s when you stand up from your desk, when you take a bathroom break, or when your pet asks to be let out.
Each time you meet with this task, stop. Stand still and take a deep breath, then check in with your body, ask yourself what you’re feeling, and how you’re responding to the moment you’re in. The pause only needs to take 30 seconds, and its purpose is simply to be aware. This is a practice that we can build more and more into the rhythms of our days, a simple way of noticing and reconnecting to ourselves and to the presence of God.
If you’d like to add a prayer to the practice, you can use these words from Every Moment Holy:
“You have called me…to learn to love,
By my small actions and choices,
Those whose paths I cross,
Moment to moment, in all settings.”
One More Thing!
I want to hear how this practice goes for you. Leave a message here or reach out to me on Threads or Instagram.
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Have I mentioned lately that the Slow Way Letter is also a podcast? It releases every Tuesday morning. It’s the same content as the letter, but designed to give you a quiet space to reflect and pray on a walk, in the car, or with your eyes closed on the couch. I hope you’ll take a listen.
This is beautiful. Your writing is beautiful. Thankful to read your words and be reminded. Looking forward to pausing more and learning to love.
This was life-giving and really hit home with me this morning. Thank you, Micha.