I'VE BEEN THINKING

I've been thinking a lot about friendship lately. I've been thinking about what is reasonable to expect from a friendship, and what is not. 

I've been thinking where I fall on those things.. where I'm a good friend, where I'm not.  Where I have been and where I haven't.

I've been thinking about honesty, and what that means. I've been thinking about how honesty isn't just "not lying" and how misleading inferences and omission of the truth is just as dishonest as outrightly speaking lies.

I've been thinking about respect and the importance of showing up... and how it really isn't that hard.

I've been thinking about grace and forgiveness. I've been thinking about patience.

I've been thinking about the pulling-in that happens when someone speaks unkindly to you.

I've been thinking about all these things...  and perhaps sometime, I'll be ready to write more about them.  

But today, I'm just thinking about them.

YOUR HARDENED HEART

It hurt when they lied to you, when they couldn't see the plea in your heart. Didn't it?

And so you hardened yours, and you turned away, and you said it didn't matter. You said you were fine.

But you weren't. Not really. A hard heart isn't fine.

You tried to make it okay. And you tried to heal. And you tried to forgive. Maybe you were successful, maybe you weren't. And yet your heart is still hard.  Because if you don't soften it, then it can't be hurt again.

Then, you can't be hurt again.

But a hard heart doesn't get to feel much love, either. A hard heart is tough to find a way into, and repels a multitude of attempts.

You want to protect... but what you really need to do is trust.  Even if you get hurt again, what you need is trust.

AFRAID TO TRUST YOU

You hurt me.

Or maybe I hurt you, too.  I don't know anymore.

I forgave you for that. I know I tried. I hope you forgave me too.

But when it came to trying again, when it came to putting myself at your mercy...

I held back. I couldn't give you that power.

I'd been hurt once.

That's not even all the way true.  I'd been hurt a lot of times.

I'm not sure you even cared.

I was afraid to trust you. I was afraid to be hurt.

Because, you see, the words you spoke and the things you did, they didn't match up.

I didn't know how to separate the truth from the lies anymore, and I wearied of trying.

I am not a very discerning person. I am often fooled, often hurt.

Some people call that gullible. Some people ridicule that and make me feel that believing people is a shortcoming.

Maybe it is. Maybe it's naivete to hope for and believe in the possibility of the good.

All I know is not being discerning means I'm wrong a lot.

Not being discerning means I hurt a lot.

And I was afraid of hurting again.

So I decided not to trust you.

That remains a decision filled with pain and doubt and sometimes regret.

The past can be loud.

And misleading. We don't always remember the truth, often just a twisted version of it.

But I decided.

And forward is the only direction left to go. 

TRUST IS LIKE A VASE

Loss of trust sucks.

It is tremendously hard to take personal responsibility that you are the one to blame for someone else losing trust in you.  But, I'm coming to realize that it is sometimes just as hard and heartbreaking to be the one who has lost trust in someone else.

It's not just something you can fix with a simple solution.  You can't patch it with tape or glue. It's just there, undermining everything.  I'm reminded of the lyrics of a song I like:

"Well, a month or so has passed and now you're back again with me
But the cracks remain unmended in our once so-perfect team.
We seem to spend all our time just trying to make things right
But there cannot be a winner in this neverending fight."

It's like that.

You can try to fix everything else... but the loss of trust just sort of hangs out in there, picking at the tape, melting the glue. Just always there...  and that's true whether you're the one that broke the trust or the one who lost theirs.

It's just sad... that's all.  It's just sad to know there is no trust where there once was much.