the wonder of being embraced

I’m a white-knuckled girl, and always have been. I grip my way through life, holding onto whatever I can for dear life—as if the holding is the making and shaping of that life I’m looking for.

Last week, I found myself in a room of ladies as we shared silence together, prayerfully. Punctuated by occasional words or prayers or quotes, we sat so still and quiet.

As we sat, I felt a knot in my mind, a headache building, twisting itself in the space between my eyes. I tried to pray it away, asking God to loosen its grip, and I as I did, I felt a shift, and instantly my hands tightened into fists. They clenched around my pen, the journal in my lap, my thigh. I noticed it, the mirroring my hands were making there in my lap.

I loosened their physical grip, and as I did, my heart and mind relaxed and began to receive what the mirror showed them:

I’m a white-knuckled girl, and always have been. I grip my way through life, holding onto whatever I can for dear life—as if the holding is the making and shaping of that life I’m looking for.

I wondered what I was gripping onto as the long days of January drew to a close. Goals and lists and to-do’s and everything in between easily sprung to mind. I felt anxious and tense, a dichotomy drawn between these things I am made to do, contained in these hands’ grips, and the rest offered to me in this living room packed with bodies and a collective sigh of silence, punctuated with shifting shoes on hardwood floor and bodies in roomy chairs.

We then listened to words of Jesus read over us, the opening lines of the sermon on the mount, ears at attention to hear a word or phrase that struck us—she who has ears, let her hear.

"You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the one most dear to you."

Embrace. The word lights up my body, goosebumps from my toes to the top of my head, a warm chill up my spine.

My mind boldly asked the Presence speaking that word to life in me, the electric current of it buzzing away, “What is the difference between these two?” Prompted to loosen my grip on things, doesn’t embrace mean basically the same thing, except with your whole self and body, instead of just those white knuckles?

Responses came in rapid-fire:

• Gripping involves control. manipulation. force. coercion.
• Embracing holds not one once of control.

Embracing holds love, affection. It is gentle, unafraid, not trying to control, but to communicate that deep desire within you to hold that thing or person it loves, and being held in return is enough.

Embracing is an act of whole self, a whole-body experience, and not just physically, but with every ounce of contained identity, it reaches, touches, holds, and stays close.

My white-knuckled grip, on the other hand, is like being on on the tilt-a-whirl at the fairgrounds. I grasp the center wheel mechanism that must be gripped and turned and pulled with force—with that primal, white-knuckle strength within me—to work the magic of that ride.

The control is yours. The amount of spin and tilt and whirl is yours. As the ride slows and ends, your hands must slack. Your grip is useless. You’ve run out of time. Control is lost, and you exit dizzy, disoriented, and queasy—needing more than a moment before you can begin again.

This is not how you or I want to live. This is not blessed living, nor is it abundant life. We were promised more than this.

The contrast to the tilt-a-whirl is the context of these sacred words.

Jesus, reclining on a hillside, above the billowing crowds, just with his disciples, his “climbing companions.” They sit, not at all like the ladies I, too, sat with, reclining with him, legs still burning but invited to rest, and to listen.

What words stood out to them, I wonder now. And when did they, too, lose the wonder of being embraced for the sake of perceived control in their own white-knuckle grips?

I see the progression in my own life in this new year, losing the wonder of embrace as I find my grip tightening around goals and projects and passions and everything in-between. This is why productivity feels overwhelming to me. This is why I feel ragged and worn down.

Learning balance isn’t learning to tighten your grip on schedules and self-care and lists; it’s learning to embrace what you’ve been given, hold your hands loosely, and lean in to who you are—embraced, beloved, held—instead of what you need to or should do.

An embrace involves open hands
on someone else's back;
a mutual hold with emptied
intentions except
to be known.
Belovedness is shared here,
touching skin and bone,
cheek and joints,
intertwined on sight
and nothing more.

A final note:

The context of this embrace here comes “when you’ve lost what’s most dear to you.”

Make no mistake here:

Grief, transition, loss, and disappointment hold the opportunity for this embrace to come.