sub-par goodbyes and Nouwen

The quality of my goodbyes has been sub-par as of late. How do you adequately say goodbye to someone? How do you tell them what they have meant to you, how they have affected your life in positive ways without making it feel awkward and uncomfortable platonically? How are we ever to relate on real gut honest and honoring levels if we are so stuck by the status quo, the fear of becoming known and inappropriately intimate? Lord knows I don’t want that to be a part of my life, but it is. And I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know how to distance my heart properly and how to risk and open up safely either. I watch people around me that are seemingly successful at it, but than I wonder about them. Are they scrambling around on the inside just as much as I am trying to figure out who is safe? I am highly suspicious that I may not be the only one.

Let me quote Henri J. M. Nouwen from “The Inner Voice of Love”.

Stay with Your Pain
“When you experience the deep pain of loneliness, it is understandable that your thoughts go out to the person who was able to take that loneliness away, even if only for a moment. When, underneath all the praise and acclaim, you feel a huge absence that makes everything look useless, your heart wants only one thing—to be with the person who once was able to dispel these frightful emotions. But it is the absence itself, the emptiness within you, that you have to be willing to experience, not the one who could temporarily take it away.
It is not easy to stay with your loneliness. The temptation is to nurse your pain or to escape into fantasies about people who will take it away. But when you can acknowledge your loneliness in a safe, contained place, you make your pain available for God’s healing.
God does not want your loneliness; God wants to touch you in a way that permanently fulfills your deepest need. It is important that you dare to stay with your pain and allow it to be there. You have to own your loneliness and trust that it will not always be there. The pain you suffer now is meant to put you in touch with the place where you most need healing, your very heart. The person who was able to touch that place has revealed to you your pearl of great price.
It is understandable that everything you did, are doing, or plan to do seems completely meaningless compared to that pearl. That pearl is the experience of being fully loved. When you experience deep loneliness, you are willing to give up everything in exchange for healing. But no human being can heal that pain. Still, people will be sent to you to mediate God’s healing, and they will be able to offer you the deep sense of belonging that you desire and that gives meaning to all you do.

Dare to stay with your pain, and trust in God’s promise to you.”

Okay. Though I love Henri, and writers like him, sometimes they make the concepts they are trying to get across more difficult to understand or to live out. So! This morning when I was waking up, my mind wandering, I stopped it and said, “OK GOD! Here I am, lonely and in pain. Help me.” That’s all I got out, it’s all I really knew how to get out because what else do you say to the Being who knows you through and through?? I think all He wants is our admission of need of Him, and then the courage to stay there. Because all He really wants is ALL of me. I mean. It’s that simple I guess. If that is simple.

The last line of that quote is the kicker: “Dare to stay with your pain, and trust in God’s promise to you.” It is daring to do that, I know! Because even on my most strong risk taking days when I feel the most brave, the daunting task of bearing with Jesus and my heart through pain seems almost overwhelming and undoable. But I guess maybe the secret behind it is to remain open and to try not to stuff.

Trusting, waiting, hoping…big, big heart words. Seems difficult to put into practice when life throws everything its got at you. But what else is there to do? At the end of the day, I am less of a human if I have not made those words more of a part of me. I want to be human. The most human I can be. With my heart fully online with all the capacity is has to love and give and heal and forgive and hope and trust. I wonder…