BP 224
I recently met a woman named Tori at a Christian ministry retreat in Sweden. She is serving with a parachurch organization in a town outside Stockholm. Due to an emotionally distant family back in the States, she doesn’t really feel that her home is in America. Due to the difficulty of fitting into the Swedish culture and mastering the language, she doesn’t really feel that Sweden is her home, either. As far as countries go, Tori is homeless.
Since she became a follower of Jesus, heaven became the home she has always longed for. Heaven is where she looks forward to fitting in some day—and the place where she will never have to say goodbye ever again. But she also wants a home while she is still here on earth.
Yes, part of the reason she aches for heaven is because on this earth there is an undesirable thing she has experienced far too often, namely, heart-wrenching goodbyes. You see, Tori has a deep sensitivity to loss because she appreciates connection so much since she knows the heartache of being emotionally alone most of her life. If a person has missed the closeness of human presence for most of life, she will hunger voraciously for love and feel devastated if she loses that rare and precious connection.
I don’t know if one reason Tori left the US and went to a foreign country was because she was subconsciously looking for a home—not a geographical home but an emotional home–but she did find a home in Sweden in the team members she met and grew close to; other Americans and even non-Americans she bonded with as fellow exiles in a foreign land.
These people became her family. These parachurch team members were all very close because they shared the Spirit of God, they shared a country far removed from their homeland, and they shared a sense of being on a mission in a foreign place together as young men and women in their twenties. Yes, they shared the daily difficulties of attempting to penetrate arguably the most secular country in the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Possibly, they were as bonded as people can be–exiles together in a foreign land.
And Tori felt the beauty of the bond more deeply than any of them. Why? Because as was mentioned earlier, she had never felt seen, known, loved deeply, or closely attached to other humans, even in her family—especially in her family. So, when she finally experienced that special bonding with others, it fed a hunger in her that had been growing daily since she was born into this world, a hunger that was so strong she almost hated to eat when the food was finally there.
Why? Tori feared losing the food that nourished her starving heart–the presence of her team members who were the family she had never had. It seems true that greater hunger leads to greater elation when one finally eats but then also a fearful dread of losing that joy and being left with only the subsequent stabbing grief that takes one’s breath away.
Tori often wondered if it would be easier not to love at all than to love and then lose that love.
Tori has a handful of other close friends besides the ones in Sweden, but they are scattered around the world on different mission fields, and she does not see them often. When she flies to spend a long weekend with them, she is still left to face the dreaded goodbye. Tori has half seriously told her friends to be mean to her when she visits so that maybe leaving won’t feel so painful.
What led me to write about Tori today? Because many members of Tori’s team are not getting their visas renewed by the Swedish government. Some have already left the country. Others will be leaving sometime during the next year. Tori’s amazing family that sees her and that she feels extremely close to is breaking up. They are leaving her.
And Tori is filled with emotions that feel uncontainable to her.
During a conversation I had with her, she said the following things to me: “I have deep sadness. I have strong fear, anger, and hurt. I feel loss, grief, and am very lonely. I cry a lot. I don’t have anyone. I don’t have a ‘go-to’ person nearby. I know I can’t be in Sweden forever, but I don’t want to leave because here is where I’ve felt part of a family. I feel apathetic, I have no vision, and it is difficult to wake up every morning and be happy. I’m losing my ‘comrades-in-arms.’ How long can I be lonely?”
Most of Tori’s fellow team members feel sad as well. But I don’t think any of them feel as deeply as her partly for the reason(s) mentioned above. Maybe a few other team members feel deeply but they know how to blunt their emotions, or they distract themselves from their strong feelings, or they share them with others. Tori tries to distract herself by going to the gym or by reading, but she cannot suppress her emotions for very long. They rush out of her heart with whitewater intensity.
No, I don’t think anyone feels as acutely about the breakup of the team as Tori does.
Tori and people like her are “gifted” with what often feels more like a curse to them, namely, the ability to feel loss at a profound level. I think Tori and others like her feel most if not all their emotions more deeply than others. Many of these individuals have experienced at some point in their lives a long period of acute aloneness that evolved into the ability to feel things at a level most people do not.
Pain carves deep cavities into the human heart that will be filled with strong desire and later, if the person knows Jesus and chooses to grow, with the possibility of deep peace, love, and joy that others cannot attain. These individuals just need to be careful not to look for love in the wrong places or to push their hunger for love so far down in their hearts that it is in accessible and leaks out in symptoms like depression, anxiety, and the apathy Tori mentioned.
Another person who had these cavities carved into the heart made the following comments after a beloved pet died: “I am frightened by how the absence of a creature can feel so vast. Imagine the loss of a human . . .? My heart aches with the reality that love and loss are inseparable. I am so sad. How brief and fragile our shared journeys are.”
Tori and others like her are special people. After walking through the furnaces of life and surviving to tell about it (or not having the words to describe it), these people are very acquainted with loneliness, with intense hunger for intimacy, with the fear of feeding the hunger because they might need someone too much, and with the dread of one day losing that which feeds their hunger (a person who hears them and knows them and loves them).
So, what are you to do if you are like Tori or possibly even feel things more deeply than her? You can choose to guard your heart so diligently that you will guard it even against love. You can numb your heart and distract it whenever you see hurt and fear and dread coming toward you. You can long for heaven and never really let yourself be loved in this world or give your love to someone else.
Indeed, you can do what C.S. Lewis talks about, a familiar reflection I have quoted several times in the past:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
There is another option besides the coffin. The doorway to life and presence may feel like an invitation to chaos and to drowning in emotions, but if someone can go with you—a friend, a mentor, a counselor, a trained pastor–you will not be alone. And aloneness is the primary issue, not the intense emotions. Much of that intensity is the hunger for relationship, for being seen, for being loved. That hunger is normal if you have not eaten the food of “withness” and have been too afraid to try.
What is the invitation for you who are so alone like Tori; for you who fear that your hunger is too great or will be a burden to others; for you who fear eating the food of presence and being too dependent on someone?
Be open to setting aside the warning sirens that will go off in your soul when you permit someone to love your heart degree by degree. Allow someone to see you beyond the steel wall—not just anyone–someone who has the ability to hear you. Allow someone to increasingly walk with you who has the gift of presence that they acquired through their own intense suffering. God did not make you to be alone. You are knowable because you are made in the imago Dei. Don’t believe any lie that tells you that you are destined to be alone.
Many people will not be able to hear you at that deeper level of aloneness—even believers in Jesus who are proscriptive or want to fix you. But don’t give up and hide forever. There are some who can. Maybe you currently don’t have a country or people who know how to translate your language of need, or maybe you are losing those who are family to you.
Who knows—your loving Creator knows–maybe after allowing a “navigator” to walk with you for years (as long as it takes), your heart will feel less pain and dread and eventually shun the coffin for love. Just know that it will take a journey.
So, don’t fear forsaking the coffin and wading into the waves and the deep water of your heart.
Remember, your Savior walks on water and calms the waves and the wind.
And if you dare to ask for it, He will send someone to walk with you. Keep on longing for heaven and remember that you are an exile on this planet but also know that God has brothers and sisters in this fleeting world who are called to see you and love you.
Lastly, pray for Tori and her team in Sweden—but especially for Tori. She feels things so deeply and needs to know that Jesus and His people can meet her in the deepest and most chaotic places of her heart. Then she can know that she will not be alone forever.
“For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,
for my hope is from him.
He only is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
On God rests my salvation and my glory;
my mighty rock, my refuge is God” ~ Psalm 62:5-7
“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” ~ 1 John 4:10-11
“And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful” ~ Colossians 3:14-15
