difficult – Aspirational Adventures

My friend’s daughter adores Renly and, as you can see from the photo, he’s keen on her. She just wants to be with him, to have him all to herself, to sit, snuggle, lie with him. And she kept saying “I love Renly”.. Photographed by myself August 2024.

I love having friends who are open and who chat and challenge me and make me think. My friends might be very diverse in many things [eg the troll/tinkerbell image] but what they have in common is the way they challenge me – and also inspire this blog! The majority of posts come from thoughts others have inspired in me. I am constantly evolving and morphing as I have open, free conversations with people who I love and trust and who love and trust me!

So here is one that grew from the other day –

We’re struggling with someone and we say, in our heads, “Jesus go and sit with them” when really we could do with Jesus giving us a hug because we are the ones struggling. The “difficult” person could be fine in their own eyes. Yes they do also need Jesus to sit by them and give them a hug but so do we. Too often, I think, we offer Jesus to others and don’t grab him for ourselves.

I got me thinking about my friend’s daughter with my dog. What if we were like that with Jesus?

I think that one of the reasons we do the “sit with that difficult person, Jesus” is because Church tells us that. So many sermons are about asking Jesus to go comfort someone else but very few on asking him to comfort, be with, encourage us. So, I think, we get to a place where we don’t think it right that we should ask Jesus to sit by us when someone else is struggling.

The other reason, I think, is because we don’t think we are “worthy” enough – the enough word again! – for Jesus to want to be with us. And sometimes I think that is because we think we should be the “sorted” ones and we should ask Jesus to be with those we don’t think are sorted.

I wonder if we think that if people we are “reaching out to” saw that Jesus was sitting beside us and giving as a hug of reassurance then they would think we weren’t up for the task of supporting them? A thought!

So we, not so much push Jesus away from ourselves but we do keep pushing him towards the “needy” person when in fact we could be much more supportive, much more helpful, much more giving if we had that support with us.

[Also – and I don’t get how this works – Jesus can be holding our hands and holding the hands of the person we are talking to – and many many other people – all that the same time. Now that is an awesome mystery!]