Love in 140 Characters

My heart is breaking tonight.  I have tear stains on my glasses and tissues scattered all around me.  A dear, dear friend of mine talked to me tonight about some hard things she was going through.  I looked into her eyes, listened to her cry, and held her in my arms.  She felt like a fragile, wounded bird.  And she isn’t—she is a beautiful woman of faith.  She’s strong and brave.  She fights battles every single day that no one knows about.  She’s funny and smart and so full of life.  Just not right now.  Life is hard for her right now.  I want to make everything better for her.  I want to bind up her broken wings and make her fly again.  And I can’t.

One of the first things I learned in recovery was this: “I can’t. God can. I’ll let Him.”  One of the second things I learned was how hard that is to do.  Letting go and letting God—it’s not easy.  I have to surrender my friend to Him, knowing that He loves her even more than I do.  He knows where she’s wounded.  And He is the only One who can turn those wounds into battle scars that she will someday be proud of.

But my heart still hurts for her.  She was at my dad’s birthday party tonight, and I could tell it wasn’t much of a party for her.  I remember that feeling so well—like you’re dying inside yet life keeps going on around you.  People keep celebrating occasions.  The minutia of life continues.  But my friend wanted to be there for my dad tonight, and she was—even though I know she’d rather have been almost anywhere else so that she didn’t have to put on a “party” face.

Speaking of my dad–he is the person who gave me my love for words and all things literary.  He also edits mercilessly because he values brevity.  His texts are along the lines of “U home?”  “K.”  His emails sometimes have words only in the subject lines; there’s nothing in the email itself.  So he likes to tease me—because try though I might, I just can’t edit my words down that far.  I love long words, long paragraphs, long books, and, as you may have noticed, long sentences.  So Dad challenged me tonight—if I was on Twitter, what would I tweet? He reminded me that I’d only have 140 characters.  140 characters!  This is impossible for someone like me—I thought.  But then I thought about my friend and my desire to solve everything for her—to mend the broken places in her heart.  And I decided to do it—to put my only comfort into 140 characters or less.  So this “tweet” is for you, Dad, and for you, my precious friend—with all my love:

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and
Wisdom to know the difference.