Toolbox

We went to see our new grand-nephew yesterday, two weeks old, all hunched over in a huddle, soft and warm, wiggling and squirming like a tight nest of bunnies. He didn’t know why he wiggled. Some small discomfort. And as hunger pangs grew, he grew more fidgety and started letting out those little newborn squeaks that bypass your brain and hit you straight in the liver or wherever it is feelings are supposed to reside. Then he scrunched his little eyes shut and you could see it coming before it hit you, the tiny forlorn wail. He was a bundle of need.

And I thought about how God gave us all a bundle of feelings to deal with, and how differently we use them, and how we learn to mete out our feelings differently as we grow and change our priorities. For this baby, the wail could be a wet diaper or a burp coming, or a minute past feeding time. Or it could be something more dire. Impossible to tell without being mom and knowing your child. You learn to guess well.

Then as parents, you are so tempted to react when your children cry, “But it’s a small thing. Why waste your bag of emotions on that? There are so much bigger things.” There are, indeed, starving children in Syria. But this makes no sense to the child, because they have drawn from the same bag you have and spent that emotion on that particular care because it seems worthy to them. A child will wail at a crushed toy, a lost blanket, a being-left-behind-for-the-evening. And you can comfort them because to you, this loss isn’t significant. “Significant” changes as you grow.

It doesn’t help to challenge the reasons your kids feel, to interrupt their stories. Once the cat is out of the bag, the emotion spent, you can’t put it back. Reasoning that the thing was not big enough to cry over doesn’t help. They’ve cried already. Our preacher told us a story in church of an athlete who faced cancer himself. Lost part of his jaw to it. And a child. And missed playing in the Superbowl by an inch. I struggled to relate because it made me feel my story was so small; why tell it? And on the other hand, why so much fuss over a Superbowl?  I’m so sorry you couldn’t get in the Superbowl.

As life moves us in and out of pain and loss, we learn to manage our bag of tricks differently, saving our emotions for the things that really matter, a moving target. The little things don’t trouble us anymore because we’ve tasted the big ones. But sometimes we lose, along with our intolerance for pain, our capacity for joy. We forget to rejoice at the little things as we’ve forgotten to cry when lunch takes too long.

Life is a lesson in adjustments. We are constantly pulling together the drawstrings of reason and emotion, trying to knit the outfit together, because since the dawn of time, these two have become estranged, and we end up spilling our bag of emotions on the ground, wasting anger, sorrow, joy, contentment on things that are undeserving. Or we judge the emotions of others by our own priorities and miss their pain because it’s unreasonable to us. I know a man who walked into the home of a widow two weeks after her husband’s death and told her to move on. He could not read her pain. Maybe knitting reasons and emotions together is one of the greatest changes God makes in us in the end, healing this chasm and letting us read one another well. When we are with Him, and our priorities are renovated, what thing could cause us pain? What loss could we mourn? Meanwhile we are in trade school, with this toolbox, learning.