“You need to toughen up.” “You need to develop a thicker skin.” Or, as Charaia Rush heard it, “You’re too soft, baby girl.”
Really, telling someone to “toughen up” is useless advice, but nonetheless, people love to dole it out. Thankfully, author Rush is having none of it. Instead, she offers readers a new paradigm for healing rejections and wounds that are inevitable in a fallen world: Becoming “courageously soft.”
Rush, a sensitive soul, had to learn this way of being after her husband repeatedly cheated on her, even when she had just given birth to their second child. As he left her with no options to reconcile (something she says is not always possible), Rush filed for divorce and moved in with her parents and her two small children, heartbroken and deeply vulnerable, wondering where it all went so wrong.
Many offered platitudes, but Rush did not skip the messy middle of her pain to get to some kind of socially acceptable—but fake—healing. Rush chose to deal with the mess inside and attune herself to painful wounds. It was here she found that God was holding her and healing her, but it wouldn’t be easy. Wounds have a way of pushing back.
“Heroes have this in common just as much as villains: Their storyline begins with a wound,” she writes. “And by the wounds of Christ, the deepest wound of our origin stories are healed.”
As she pressed into “the secret place,” Rush learned to be bravely honest to God about not just her hurts but the way those hurts had constructed stubborn and deceptive “beliefs that bubbled up from (her) scars.”
Lament, she says, is our best tool for healing. It allows us to cry out to God like King David did, with all our confusion, rejections, and insecurity. This habit invites God into our disappointments, instead of pushing him away with a hardening heart.
“In Christ, love speaks a louder word over the names we give ourselves in our lowest … moments.”
One of my favorite chapters in the book is “Older Brother Syndrome,” a substantial and artful exploration of the Prodigal Son story. The older brother often comes off as hopelessly self-righteous and unloving. But God saw his wounding as clearly as he saw the broken heart of the prodigal son.
“Underneath self righteous anger is almost always a deep longing to be fully seen and fully loved,” Rush writes. “... But God in his goodness leaves the door open for both of his (children). In His extravagant love, the Father runs to the prodigal son as he returns—and He comes out to plead with the older son sitting outside his home” telling him “You are always with me. Everything I have is yours.”
God’s great tenderness is also shown in the story of Joseph, who kept his heart “courageously soft” after horrific betrayal at the hands of his brothers and then a cruelly unfair prison term. She highlights a truth often left unanalyzed: Joseph wept seven times when his brothers came to him, begging for his forgiveness. He had obviously used his years of pain and grief well, lamenting and allowing God to enter his devastation. Joseph could have become the toughest, most toxic and jaded guy around, but he became another person altogether. “When we allow Christ to enter our disappointment, our wonder and hope for life are preserved,” Rush writes.
Like Joseph and Rush, we all have much to forgive. Though she initially and quickly forgave her husband for his failings, she realized later that she had jumped to forgiveness because she thought she had to, and therefore had not truly forgiven at all. Jesus’ call to forgive “seventy times seven” reveals the habitual nature of forgiveness, not a one-and-done choice but an “active path.” In the Christian world we are often pressured to “forgive and forget,” but as Rush points out, “the axe forgets but the tree remembers.”
But “(t)here is a softening when we grieve the love we never received, the words we never heard, and the safety we weren’t afforded,” she writes.
We are all disappointed and are dealing with wounds big and small, old and new. This rich and beautiful book calls us to “return to tenderness.” A tender heart is a resilient one, as strong and soft as water that cuts through rock and also keeps us afloat
A heart softened and held by God, Rush asserts, “is still a force.” (Baker Books)
About the Author
Lorilee Craker, a native of Winnipeg, Man., lives in Grand Rapids, Mich. The author of 16 books, she is the Mixed Media editor of The Banner. Her latest book is called Eat Like a Heroine: Nourish and Flourish With Bookish Stars From Anne of Green Gables to Zora Neale Hurston.