When Love Looks Like A Latte
Christian musician Laura Story was on Focus on the Family this week to relate the impact of her marriage through her husband's life-threatening and then life-altering brain tumor. As she waited through days in the hospital of wondering whether he would live, Christian friends would remind her of the Bible's promises that all events would come together for the Christian's good. Sometimes these friends, she says, would make such specific application they would begin to console her with thoughts of reunification with her healed husband in Heaven, all while he still fought for his life. On reflection, Story says at that moment she didn't need a biblical Band-Aid for the gaping wound of her all-consuming uncertainty and grief. The most helpful words she was offered in those awful moments were, she admits, "Here is your latte."
Aphorisms are so much easier, though. Offering the latte in such moments requires that the would-be comforter quiet his or her own internal drama long enough to actually notice patterns about people in the surrounding world. In such patterns can occur to the interventionist that to this particular person in need at this particular moment, love looks like a latte. The seeds of such humble, timely acts of kindness are more often sown in abiding, day-to-day friendship than in the midst of a crisis. Curiosity about people's quirky individual differences in the times when they aren't setting off alarms of dire need can yield clue after clue as to what small acts of kindness they most appreciate in the stretches when life gets difficult. Such slowly collected observations, though, don't often come with the red cape and dramatic refrain of heroic intervention. For the person coming alongside someone in pain who hasn't collected an inventory of such small interventions over time, having to ASK how to help is even more humbling.
Aphorisms also make an easier offering to those in crisis because offering the metaphorical or actual latte implies a time commitment to sit and listen. Offering the quick answer from the most ready mental inventory can allow for moving on to the next person's crisis, or back into the preferred, self-imposed media bubble. Laura Story says that along with the lattes that meant the most to her where the offers of a shoulder to cry on that came along with them as she felt and reasoned her way through what the future might look like. Internal exaggeration of the time and intimacy required of such a listening commitment can keep those who would help the hurting from even taking the first step in this direction. If the would-be helper can admit to being tempted by exaggerated thinking, he or she can begin to understand and commiserate with the shouts of what-if thinking the person in crisis must be attempting to subdue.
Offering the drive-by aphorism in place of the meaningful gesture and offer of ongoing relationship also precludes the possibility of uncomfortable self-examination. If the quick answer isn't offered on the way to something else, if sitting and silently sipping the latte is truly what comfort requires, this creates space in which reflection, willingly or unwillingly, can take place. "Generalities sink the subject," warns Edmund Burke in a political context, and the distaste for ambiguity certainly isn't confined to that arena. Burke also, looking back on the downfall of another statesman, confesses ruefully that he, "For a wise man, seemed governed too much by general maxims." Sayings with the ring and age of wisdom can be found to temporarily uphold any position. It is in time, in space, and in enforced, reflective silence that the purported rescuer might begin to rightfully question his or her haste to apply the same Band-Aid, or tourniquet, in dissimilar situations.
The certainty Christians place in the Bible as God's Word can actually be drafted to impose certainty of application which is not given to men. Toby, the Communications Director on the political drama The West Wing who is both a dripping faucet of personal skepticism and a gushing fountain of soaring public rhetoric warns against this. Toby, who is Jewish, tells another believer in God's Word that he reveres the Book itself, but that he also distrusts the human capacity to apply or misapply it. Pausing, then, to minister to the person rather than offering a quick answer to an equation can be confession's concession. The pause to make room for the gesture in place of the prescription admits inability to know God's exact intentions and of the believer's readiness to supply favorite guesses. The silent, or at least subtle, gesture gives voice to the many places in the Bible in which God chooses to enshrine in that Word the writer's doubt, fear, anguish, and even anger at a moment of crisis.
Aphorisms are so much easier, though. Offering the latte in such moments requires that the would-be comforter quiet his or her own internal drama long enough to actually notice patterns about people in the surrounding world. In such patterns can occur to the interventionist that to this particular person in need at this particular moment, love looks like a latte. The seeds of such humble, timely acts of kindness are more often sown in abiding, day-to-day friendship than in the midst of a crisis. Curiosity about people's quirky individual differences in the times when they aren't setting off alarms of dire need can yield clue after clue as to what small acts of kindness they most appreciate in the stretches when life gets difficult. Such slowly collected observations, though, don't often come with the red cape and dramatic refrain of heroic intervention. For the person coming alongside someone in pain who hasn't collected an inventory of such small interventions over time, having to ASK how to help is even more humbling.
Aphorisms also make an easier offering to those in crisis because offering the metaphorical or actual latte implies a time commitment to sit and listen. Offering the quick answer from the most ready mental inventory can allow for moving on to the next person's crisis, or back into the preferred, self-imposed media bubble. Laura Story says that along with the lattes that meant the most to her where the offers of a shoulder to cry on that came along with them as she felt and reasoned her way through what the future might look like. Internal exaggeration of the time and intimacy required of such a listening commitment can keep those who would help the hurting from even taking the first step in this direction. If the would-be helper can admit to being tempted by exaggerated thinking, he or she can begin to understand and commiserate with the shouts of what-if thinking the person in crisis must be attempting to subdue.
Offering the drive-by aphorism in place of the meaningful gesture and offer of ongoing relationship also precludes the possibility of uncomfortable self-examination. If the quick answer isn't offered on the way to something else, if sitting and silently sipping the latte is truly what comfort requires, this creates space in which reflection, willingly or unwillingly, can take place. "Generalities sink the subject," warns Edmund Burke in a political context, and the distaste for ambiguity certainly isn't confined to that arena. Burke also, looking back on the downfall of another statesman, confesses ruefully that he, "For a wise man, seemed governed too much by general maxims." Sayings with the ring and age of wisdom can be found to temporarily uphold any position. It is in time, in space, and in enforced, reflective silence that the purported rescuer might begin to rightfully question his or her haste to apply the same Band-Aid, or tourniquet, in dissimilar situations.
The certainty Christians place in the Bible as God's Word can actually be drafted to impose certainty of application which is not given to men. Toby, the Communications Director on the political drama The West Wing who is both a dripping faucet of personal skepticism and a gushing fountain of soaring public rhetoric warns against this. Toby, who is Jewish, tells another believer in God's Word that he reveres the Book itself, but that he also distrusts the human capacity to apply or misapply it. Pausing, then, to minister to the person rather than offering a quick answer to an equation can be confession's concession. The pause to make room for the gesture in place of the prescription admits inability to know God's exact intentions and of the believer's readiness to supply favorite guesses. The silent, or at least subtle, gesture gives voice to the many places in the Bible in which God chooses to enshrine in that Word the writer's doubt, fear, anguish, and even anger at a moment of crisis.
Well said
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