When I was 5 or 6, one of the neighborhood kids had a pair of boxing gloves so of course we had to try them out. My problem was that most of the kids were older and I soon found myself pinned by a kid twice my size punching me in the head (yeah, that’s how we boxed in Pico Rivera). As a result, I was hospitalized, almost paralyzed, and in traction for 3 days with a dislocated neck.
Recently I’ve felt paralyzed trying to write. It’s like I’ve been punched and left in traction because of some hard things happening to family and close friends. It’s hard not to let emotions completely control your thoughts and with me these thoughts would surface every time I would begin to write and no matter what the subject was, my emotions would begin to poison everything that I wrote. It was like I was writing at someone instead of to or for them.
People don’t respond well to you blasting their issues (I don’t). But people also have a hard time letting go of the issues and problems they see (I do). Wanting to fix the issues is part of what motivates us to make a difference in the world as well as in the people we know and love, but we need to remember that the goal is not to win the argument, but the heart, and we’re not going to win the heart by arguing!
Sometimes you have to care enough to speak to the issues and sometimes, like the prodigal son, you have to care enough to let people go and pray that someday they will see their issues. How do you know when to do which? It’s not always clear, but you can’t live paralyzed. Sometimes you just have to tenderly move forward living in the tension of them both.
