Everyone you meet is hurting.
Whether you realize it or not, every single day you rub shoulders with people who are all carrying great pain.
They are among the expansive multitude of walking wounded in your midst, many presently laboring as they try to take that most excruciating of steps: the next one.
Most of them don’t wear their damage so that it can be easily seen, though. To be vulnerable like that is to risk further injury and so they gradually learn to conceal and cover the tender, hemorrhaging, torn-up parts of themselves from others. Though they surely suffer in the solitude and silence, at least there they can find some illusion of control there, some measure of safety.
And if you aren’t really looking closely at people as they cross your path, you might likely mistake them for the confident, secure, unaffected successes that they so desperately want to be seen as. You might well be fooled by their carefully crafted veneers of success and self-reliance and believe they have no need for compassion or compliment or kindness. Rest assured, they do.
I imagine that you too are a member of this great congregation of the battered and bruised, this Church of The Hurting. I imagine that like the people all around you, you have well-hidden burdens, those constant reminders of all that you have not become or all that you have failed to do. You too, are likely consumed with the dual tasks of shielding the contents of your shattered shell all the while pretending you are indestructible. The good and the bad news here is: you’ve been found out. You can take off the cape and the costume and join the rest of us badly shaken mortals down here on the ground.
Not knowing the specific road you’ve traveled, I can’t speak any precise words to alleviate the very specific hurt you are carrying. I can only bid you welcome. All I can do is assure you that you are in very good company, that you are among similarly broken brethren as you live and breathe and move through your day. We are all kinfolk in our imperfection.
You may feel as though you are irreparably broken but your fractures are not beyond repair. We all have those cracked fault lines; places that need to be filled in and sured up and protected. None of us are whole here.
In light of this, may you practice relentless benevolence in your travels. May you continually seek a softer way of speaking to people, a gentler way of handling them, because you know they are as brittle and fragile and prone to breaking as you are. Remember that no one is immune from suffering, so take time to look deeply into people and see their damage and go easy on them.
But allow yourself this courtesy, too. Realize that you also deserve this same gentleness, this same space to fail. Treat your own heart as a delicate thing.
In the middle of the speed and the noise of this life; in the dizzying parade that we defiantly strut through every day trying to fool people into believing that we’re all okay, it can be a challenge to remember that we’re all not okay. I hope that you will, though, because it will change the way you walk the rest of the journey.
Today, find your place in this great congregation of flawed, wounded souls and feel right at home here.
Join us in a new religion of authenticity.
Church of The Hurting, welcome.
