tender heart

To my sheer and utter mortification, I came to the realization on sunday evening that I may, in fact, be tender hearted. Let me back up a bit to explain.

I grew up playing sports. Soccer, t-ball (on the boys team, of course), softball, lacrosse (in the later years), etc etc etc. Although I did own barbies, I recall playing with my brother's GI Joes much more frequently and the barbies were merely used to torment my cousin Ben. (sorry, benjo.) I was the test dummy on all of Adam and his little boy scout friends' push car things (and have scars to prove it). I got jealous of my brother when he got a BB gun from Grandpa George and all I got was a music box and a copy of charlotte's web from Grandma Dorothy. Get the picture?

It started changing around... college, perhaps? I wore my first pair of real high-heels when in Spain (my Junior year, I believe). I remember the shoes. Which is the first thing to note. I remember the shoes. I fell in love with shoes. I took a watercolor class and painted roses. I started, in earnest, watching decorating shows- beginning with TLC. And now I have fabric flowers adorning my headboard, lace runners on most of my furniture, over 60 pairs of shoes in the closet (I don't want to talk about it.), and a basket full of make-up. These things do not make me tender-hearted. They may make me a bit more... feminine, according to worldly standards. But they did mark a change in my patterns and behaviors.

Fast forward to Sunday evening. I'm babysitting an infant, and after just fed her, changed a nasty diaper and rocked her to sleep, I started back on my newest book, So Long Insecurity (Beth Moore's newest). A rather poignant passage states, "... the more tenderhearted we are, the more vulnerable to insecurity we'll likely be. Some people take things harder and deeper to heart than others. It's not a matter of weakness. It's a matter of personal sensitivity... I feel everything. My joys are huge, and so are my sorrows. If I'm mad, I'm really mad, and if I'm despondent, I wonder how on earth I'll go on. Then I get up, pour some coffee, and move on to the next emotion and forget how depressed I was an hour ago." She goes on to say, "Life is really hard. No one can escape it. No one is unscathed by it. But we are not just flailing aimlessly in a universal black hole. There is purpose. There is order- because there is God."

Maybe it's just this time in my life, but I feel like I've never felt before. My heart explodes with happiness, with sadness, with grief, and with love. And all of those can happen within a day. But I take comfort in the fact that, once again in Beth's words, "He knows it's scary to be us." "Let Him tell you you're worth wanting, loving, even liking, pursuing, fighting for, and yes, beloved, keeping."

*k