Find a Way to Bear Up

Several years ago, I took six poetry workshops on Zoom with Danusha Laméris, a beautiful, gifted poet who lives in California.

Danusha was making a point that I’ve forgotten, but her story remains with me and I think of it almost every day. She told us that she had a young son who was hospitalized multiple times with a chromosome deficiency that no one could diagnose. He died before he became a teen. (I can’t remember all the details and I wish Danusha would find this blog post to correct it.)

The stress of having her son deathly ill for years with no answers was agony, and the medical staff tried to be helpful by promising her that some day there would be resolution.

But there was one tall, wise doctor who carefully and lovingly explained to her that there might never be an explanation. “You will have to find a way to bear up while not knowing what is wrong with your son.”

Danusha said he said it gently and kindly and full of love, and his words helped her shift into a way of living that, though still hard, made it possible to go on.

I often think of that wise doctor and how his words apply to all of us in some way.

Life is beastly hard in many ways and places, and there are often no good ways out of the hard pieces.

Singleness is hard and marriage is hard.

Raising children is hard and being childless is hard.

Forgiving and budgeting and exercising and being sick and hosting and grieving and waiting and deciding and repairing is hard, hard, hard.

Difficulty doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re doing something wrong and need to correct it. Difficulty means that there might be no quick resolution to this, so our next goal has to be to learn how to carry this weight well. We need to find a way to bear up under the hard.

Sometimes I think that’s a key part of being an adult: finding what strengthens me and then doing that regularly.

Finding a way to do hard things doesn’t mean that we should grit our teeth and muscle through the next big task. I think living well in difficult seasons requires nurturing a heart that is both soft and strong.

That’s what Danusha did. Over the years marked by griefs, she has kept her eyes open to the light and the beauty around her and puts it into poetry. The sting of multiple losses pierces her lines, and grief is a pervasive theme for her, but it doesn’t have the last word in her story.

You don’t have to write poems to deal with hard things, although I bet you can write a better poem than you think you can.

To stay soft and strong, some people pray breath prayers.

Or take daily silent walks.

Or cry when they need to.

Or set the timer for ten minutes and read or nap.

Or laugh with children.

Notice how these physical responses can help to build the muscles that help carry emotional or spiritual weight.

Those tears when you see the morning star before dawn? That’s your soft heart, sensitive to beauty and wonder.

That grin and deep sigh before you walk into the next big assignment? That’s your strong heart keeping you vertical and resilient.

The world doesn’t need more harsh, strident, strong women. We need sensitive, impressionable women with strong, resolved, steady, thoughtful hearts that keep doing the next right thing without crumpling. And when they crumple, they cry awhile then get back up.

Soft, not flabby.

Strong, not strident.

Being soft and strong is a way to bear up in the hard places that might never be resolved until the new creation.

The way Jesus lived and loved models a way for us to be soft and strong, able to bear up under heaviness as He did. And the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is in you and ahead of you and over you. He is very strong on your behalf. And His heart is soft toward all that is beautiful and all that is broken.