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| Karl sitting with his sweet little cousin |
Last night around 1:00 AM I heard Karl calling out for me. Every night this week I'd been up multiples times with either Karl or Simon, it had just been a rough sleep week around here, so I was not too thrilled.
I went into Karl's room and he was crying that his feet were bothering him. I examined them with the flashlight, and could see a few little blisters forming around his big toe, the source of our woes.
We tried lotion, medicine, soaking his feet in water, socks on, socks off, everything I could think of to help his feet stop bothering him enough so that he could relax and go back to sleep, but two and a half hours later he was still crying and they were still bothering him, and I was exhausted.
Finally he calmed down enough to climb back in bed, but he still wanted me with him. I curled up at the top of his bed above his pillow and rubbed his back and hair while he continued to toss and turn and whimper about his feet. I was tired and uncomfortable, and just wanted to go and climb back into my own bed, but when I asked him if he thought I could leave he started crying again, so I settled back down and continued rubbing his head.
I'd been praying for ideas on how to help him, praying for him to be able to relax and fall back asleep, praying for patience, and as I lay there I began to pray "Please just help me be here for Karl. Help me have the strength just to sit with him while he needs me"
Sitting with people through hard things has never been something I've been good at. I am a pretty terrible listener (which I'm really trying to work on, although I feel like progress is terribly slow) because I'm constantly trying to say or do something to "fix" things, or saying something related that just popped into my head, instead of just listening. I am much more comfortable doing something for someone, and I feel very inadequate in my ability to just be a presence. I never feel like I have the right thing to say, or even anything to say at all, and then I get nervous and start saying all the wrong things. So I avoid being the person that sits with people through things.
But as I lay there, I thought about the idea of just sitting with someone, someone we can't do anything for other than be there with them. I thought of people who have sat with me through hard things. I thought of how uncomfortable it can be to be the person that is sitting there, but how comforting that presence can be sometimes. I thought of our Saviors willingness to suffer all that we suffer, not because by doing so He was making it so we didn't have to suffer those hard things, but just so that he could sit with us in complete compassion as we go through our valleys of loss and sorrow. And as I sat there, uncomfortable and tired, I felt peace. I felt love surrounding me and Karl as we sat there together, just being there through the thing that was hard for him.
Today I've been thinking about how little I take advantage of God's gift of being able to sit with me through hard things, being able to be there along side me. So often my prayer is "take this away", or "make this change", and I want to work on the "but if not, just be with me, just let me feel you near me as I go through this". I've realized that because of how He values my agency, He won't push himself into my life uninvited, and I haven't been inviting Him to sit with me through hard things, and what a loss that is for me.
So, today, here's to me learning to just sit, and learning to let God sit with me.
