I remember being in elementary school when the summer days started to shorten, and it was almost time to return to school. I wanted summer to last longer, but I also admitted that it would be nice to see my friends again. There was no social media, iPhones, or email, so seeing friends during the summer was limited. As the first day of school approached, I started to anticipate the arrival of “the letter.” Each day, I watched for the mail to arrive, anxious to see if there was a letter from my new teacher telling me which class I would be in this year. Of course, I wanted to know who my teacher would be, but I was most excited to call my friends and find out who would be in my class.
Fast forward to the present. The letters arrive as emails now, but the anticipation and message are the same. Gardner sat next to her daughter, Ruth, as she opened the email that announced, “This is Ms. Scott. Welcome to the First Grade! I’m so happy to be your teacher!” Then, the texts started coming. One by one, they read, “I got Ms. Mitchell!” After four similar texts, reality set in. Ruth was placed in one class, and all her closest friends would be in another.
Gardner didn’t know what to do. Her gut told her to call the school, tell them about their terrible mistake, and push them to change it. She felt for Ruth, anticipated her pain, and wanted to use that empathy to make things right. That night, her husband spoke up. He thought this was an opportunity to help Ruth grow and develop resiliency. The dilemma had developed: advocate or relent.
Open-relational parenting seeks overall well-being, which is a goal that requires discernment among many factors. As Gardner considers this parenting moment, she feels Ruth’s disappointment and pain in being separated from her closest friends. She wants to intervene to fix the problem for her. But there are other factors to consider. The teachers and administrators were probably not arbitrary in their classroom placement decisions. They have some authority, and trying to subvert their authority may not be a good example. Ruth may find new friends in her new class and expand her social interactions and leadership possibilities. The decision seems to be between advocating for changing the situation or doing nothing. When facing decisions that look binary, we can often find a third way.
Some days, bad things happen in our children’s lives. Sometimes, we reply by wanting to fight and fix the bad. Before responding too quickly, we may need to listen to Sadness from the movie Inside Out when she says, “Crying helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life’s problems.” Henri Nouwen says it this way:
For the word [compassion] comes from roots that mean literally to “suffer with”; to show compassion means sharing in the suffering “passion” of another. Compassion understood in this way asks more from us than a mere stirring of pity or a sympathetic word.
To live with compassion means to enter others’ dark moments. It is to walk into places of pain, not to flinch or look away when another agonizes. It means to stay where people suffer.1
Nouwen recognizes that we need to “stay where people suffer.” Sometimes, Joy must sit with Sadness and let her be in her dark moment. God does this with us.
God’s essence is love. Paul points to Jesus’ demonstration of divine love through kenosis or pouring himself out:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.2
Something “poured out” is also “poured into” something else. With that slight perspective shift, we can think about God joining the world and being with us. When reading this scripture, we sometimes focus solely on Jesus in the form of God, and we miss that he came to be, live, and suffer like us. Thomas Jay Oord calls this divine “self-giving” and says, “Jesus’ self-giving love points to and reveals God’s self-giving, others-enabling love.”3
One of the worst aspects of sadness and suffering is going through it alone. Jürgen Moltmann notes, “The suffering in suffering is the lack of love, and the wounds in wounds are the abandonment, and the powerlessness in pain is unbelief. And therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love… Through his own abandonment by God, the crucified Christ brings God to those who are abandoned by God.”4 Through the cross, God experiences the suffering of creation and suffers with us.
Some situations call for us to advocate for our children; however, the only alternative is not to sit passively. Another option is to use our empathy for our children and sit with them in their sadness and disappointment. We can tell them we love them, admit that we are sad when things don’t go right, and emulate how we move past those situations. By letting them “obsess over the weight of life’s problems,” we empower them to accept the present, let it move into the past, and create their future.
photo: thirdman, pexels
- Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope During Hard Times (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 59. ↩︎
- Phil. 2:5-8 (NRSV). ↩︎
- Thomas Jay Oord, Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2022), 158. ↩︎
- Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, 1st Fortress Press (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 46. ↩︎
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