Everyone is Broken

 Maybe it's because it's Lent, but lately the voices of discouragement have me very much on the defensive. They remind of my past failures and how I hurt other people and messed up opportunities to share true friendship and fellowship with others.

Deep inside me is a great fear, one that has existed in my since childhood. It is that in any friendship I make with others, that the friendship is always more important to me than to the other person. My fear is always that unless I keep the other person rightly entertained, amused, etc., they will lose interest in me and move on. So I have assumed that all the maintenance of the friendship is on me. 

The people who have broken this pattern with me, who have demonstrated and proven that they value the friendship as much as I do, or perhaps even more, are the ones who earn my lifetime trust and loyalty. So rare do they seem to me.

I am particularly susceptible to believing that other people are fragile. In my soul, I fear that I break them because of my enthusiasm for engaging with them in playful activity. I was conscious of this fear even when I was three years old. Americans in particular--at least the ones below a certain age--feel fragile to me, as if you have to maintain a perfect record to stay friends, and a single false step will make people turn their backs on you. With older folks and foreigners I know, I feel this much less. I feel that friendships are much more durable, and people are more patient and forgiving with each other's foibles. I feel like this has something to do with technology, specifically television, and how it created an postmodern expectation of human interactions that is impossible to achieve among real human beings.

Part of this is the fear that I will say or do the wrong thing unintentionally that will cause the other person to get insulted or angry with me, and they will then be done with me at that point. I will break them, or as I used to say, "blow them up." They go away, not wanting to be friends anymore. There are no seconds chances. Only time heals. Perhaps they come back, but then I am even more apprehensive about blowing them up again.

This idea that other people are fragile in this way is so embedded in my soul that it feels like a core part of my identity.  

In my wisdom I look back at the times I forced people to stay away from me because I feared the intimacy of true friendship with others. That is, I pushed them away before they had a chance to leave me. I caused the very thing I feared, but at least it was under my control. 

It doesn't have to be in the form of cross words. Often it is just be taking my playful nature too far. I have a very playful imagination, and I seek out others who will "play" with me that way. But I tend to break people that way, by letting my imagination go so far that I get the response of "you're too weird for me." And then I am alone again, wishing I had kept a rein on myself.

How I hate living this way, in this constant fear of breaking people. Having lived so much of my life this way, I don't want to be this way anymore. 

I ask myself: is this the way everyone feels? Is this just the human condition? Do we all live in fear of friendships disappearing at any moment over a miscommunication, or worse, an intended communication that reveals too much about someone else, that we wish we hadn't seen in them?

I do not know the answer to that question. We are all of us broken in some way. That is the human condition in the fallen world. Sometimes our brokenness overlaps that of others in a way that feels like some mercy from God that people can find each other and connect. 

I want to say, to my closest friends:

I know you are broken too. I know that you feel yourself to be broken. That is what I cherish about you, this feeling that in some sense we are both broken in a way that makes us understand each other in a way like no one else can understand us. We partially alleviate each other's brokenness in a way that, at least fleetingly, makes us feel un-alone. That I might do that for you, dear friend, gives me more joy than you can imagine. That this is not one-sided, and you might actually need me as a friend gives me a peace that feels like a little bit of Eden restored on Earth, and a promise of what is to come beyond this life.

To deny that we can do this for each other is to deny God, to deny the Holy Spirit to move our hearts.