To Build A Trust

This story excerpt is a look back to nine years ago when we listened for half a year with a man who was living with more wounds and losses than anyone should. It’s a story of how trust, safety, and love was created, and how those vital gifts gave him new life when he needed it the most ... 

January 2014, via email:

Right after the new year began, my wife of 14 years shared that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue with our marriage. She informed me that she “needed space” to sort through her feelings. We had just experienced a season of many difficulties: my battle with cancer in 2011; my mom’s recent battle with breast cancer; her mom’s passing away in the summer of 2013; the death of my dad last month; and to add to all that, I found one of the persons I am working with – dead - in his home two weeks ago.

My wife’s request for distance shocked me. I was absolutely devastated.

During the next few weeks, I experienced a numbness that is indescribable. I knew that our marriage had been struggling, but my ability to see “reality” was enveloped in clouds of denial. Sleeplessness, overwhelming feelings of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection created a spiral downward into an abyss of severe depression. I was truly spiritually, physically, and emotionally bankrupt. My life was in total collapse and I felt severely hopeless.

We responded as soon as we could:

Thank you so much for reaching out to us. It took an incredible amount of courage and we are proud of you for taking the first step ... We’ll meet with you as soon as we all possibly can …

He replied:

I am beating myself up pretty bad. Am very hurt - feeling betrayed, sad, anxious, fearful … I don’t even know how to continue the grieving process after losing my dad ... Pain. Numb. Confusion. Denial.

We met the following week on a Friday, at an area coffee shop.

The man who walked in looked as if he had been totally beaten up by life. An indescribable weight was bearing down on him. His appearance suggested someone who had everything, figuratively everything, in his life “hit the fan”- and it had. Our immediate response was to each give him the giant hug we sensed he needed.

We genuinely cared and we listened, as intently as we could, as he voiced what his wounded heart was feeling. We tried to simply enter into the horrendous confusion with him. His words were few, and sometimes absent altogether. There were many moments in which the three of us simply sat, not speaking, still, in solidarity with him.

We continued meeting with him nearly every Friday through the winter and into the spring. We sent him regular email and text messages reminding him he was loved. We wanted him to know there was more to his life than the devastation he was experiencing. But for the longest time he wasn’t ready. Our conversations were acutely intense because his agony and sorrow were so great to bear.

We often felt as if we weren’t helping him at all.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a new day appeared to be dawning. As winter turned into spring and spring into summer his empty and deflated heart started to show signs of filling up again.

He decided to take a new job in Salem, Oregon, with a mission to men experiencing homelessness.  We saw a new and brighter light shining all around him. We could see it in his face and we could sense it in his demeanor. His life was changing.

Three and a half years after our first meeting, his life changed even more.

Two weeks after he arrived in his new state and at his new job he visited a new church and quietly slipped into a seat. Before the service began a friendly woman, about his age, sat down next to him in the area in which she always sat. They greeted one another and continued a conversation following the service. Learning he was quite new to the area, she invited him to have coffee at a place nearby. He accepted. They kept having coffee and had hundreds more conversations. Daily. Serious. Emotionally intimate. She, too, had great trauma and disruption in her life. Her husband was killed while driving, leaving her a single mom with three adolescent children. The past seven years had been lonely; starting over with no partner, raising the children by herself was an immense responsibility.

They became two wounded souls slowly beginning to help heal one another. They fell in love.

He kept us apprised of developments in their relationship. He introduced us to her and together, the four of us had many conversations. They were perfect for each other, we believed.

A series of text messages:

Good evening, gents, just a quick update ... we had some serious chats this weekend. We are discussing what moving towards marriage looks like!!!!

... I’m going to ask her officially tomorrow. Will keep you posted ...

... Hey guys! Miracle!!! She said yes!!!!! Any chance you guys can be my Best Men on 7/22? Thanks for everything. NEVER dreamed in a million years that I would see myself as the most fortunate man on Earth – like today. We both love you.

We accepted his touching invitation to be his best men.  So, that night we stood next to him in the yard of the bride’s home as she and he made their vows before a standing room only gathering of 250 family members and friends in a ceremony that was touching and redemptive, beautiful in every way.

It took a community to lift them to last night’s celebration of their love. A community providing encouragement, patience, reassurance and a few well-placed verbal kicks to the ass to remind him that he was deserving of love - and a new wife and life – again.

It takes a community that clothes each of us in love to show us how love can sustain and redeem us.  Their community accompanied them through it all – the losses, the devastation, the loneliness – and joined together to witness the fruit of such love. 

A sacred moment of celebration.

We couldn’t help but think about being clothed in love as we prepared for the wedding, dressed in our new suits matching the groom’s, how it took a community to get us looking our best for the service.   The bride and groom gifted the suits to us.  Bow ties were handmade by the bride’s 18-year old daughter, a fashion student and design prodigy.  The groom and we had no idea how to tie real bow ties.  The only kind any of us had ever worn was the clip on variety, as we dressed in our childhood Easter finest.   After dozens of attempts, after watching several YouTube how-to videos, after a half dozen different pairs of hands fussing at each of our necks, and with cameras whirring and bystanders chuckling at each entertaining, failed effort, our ties were finally camera and wedding worthy.  We couldn’t possibly have gotten those bow ties tied without the community support.  It’s a small symbol; but an apt one. 

We all need accompaniers, for the small, seemingly insignificant and especially for the large, momentous moments of our lives.  We need them for everything in between, as well.

We need others who can listen to and help hear the deepest yearnings of our hearts. Accompaniers willing to sit with us. Accompaniers willing to listen. Accompaniers willing to work at it until we get it reasonably right. Accompaniment is willing to bear witness to others who need to know love and redemption and rescue can be real.

Very few of us like pain. Most of us want to mask it, fix it, make it disappear. Much like an epidural given to a mother in the midst of giving birth, we want to numb what hurts and take the feeling away. If we can accompany one another through our heartache and hurt, sitting in it with each other, not masking it, avoiding it or pretending it’s not there at all, we would all be better for it.

That weekend - now nine years ago - we were utterly privileged to join our very dear friends, by standing with them in the biggest public moment of their lives together.  After all we’ve shared with them, we wouldn’t have missed that moment for the world. 

It all started with the quiet and ongoing visits to the coffee shop, outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where we shared so much time with him, listened to him, sometimes sat in silence with him when he didn’t have the words to say anything, and showed him that he was worthy of being loved. Those visits built a trust, a deep and intimate relationship together, that created the space for him to begin to heal and to believe that he was worthy of love again, after such a long season when he didn’t believe that he was.