The Courage To Be Vulnerable

Today I drove past my daughter's High School, the Dairy Queen we used to make late night ice cream runs to, and the condo where she died while I slept soundly in the next room. The tears gushed even as I fought them back. I sobbed over my steering wheel like I sometimes do when I travel down this road. Yet rather than avoid it, I make myself go down this terrible street. Why? Because I never want to forget what I learned at such a terrible price. Even when it reduces me to a broken pieces, I choose the road that I don't want to travel. Now when I am lost, I choose to reach out for someone's hand and let myself be comforted for awhile. This is what vulnerability looks like. It isn't pretty, is it? It's messy and often humiliating. But there in the car, sobbing out my anguish, I was my most beautiful self, because behind the tears and all the confusion, a heart was being healed. When people open their hearts, they get better.

We are easily disassembled and not easily mended. Yet the strongest heart demonstrates a willingness to be torn so it might be healed. A heart that demonstrates a willingness to suffer is the same heart that has unknowingly called angels who will scatter the demons. Looking at our mistakes is hard and embracing them takes such immense honesty; to sit with our pain is an act of courage. When you see another person trudge on despite the pain, tears stinging their eyes, a miracle is unfolding right in front of you, a miracle that only those who are vulnerable enough to explore their darkness will ever know. An infinite power is calling them to push upward past the hard ground and around the boulders on top of them. Love's reach will push you upward so you can find your way to the top.    

When you love someone, your heart is broken open against your will, again and again. It has to-love can't go deeper unless it shoves its tentacled roots even further into the soil of your heart, until you surrender to the softness of the sweet earth all around, into the possibility of sporting a different color and to the allure of becoming a sweeter fragrance. When you really love someone, you give a piece of you that can't be taken back. You hand them the key and whisper: 'Please don't lose this key.' And when they drop it or give it back to us, we shatter, and pieces of us are scattered. The winds sweep in and blow our dreams away in a million wicked directions. The most grown up thing we can do is to hand the key to someone else, again and again, because the rose that blooms in the Spring must grow out of its agonizing seed. The spot that eventually grows the flower is the same spot you thought would open and swallow you. When you have hurt more, and suffered longer than you imagined a person ever could; when you have been stretched until you thought you would surely snap, in those precious and terrible moments you were standing at your holy mountain. There is a sacredness about a completely broken person, because a person who is led through a fire becomes an inestimable treasure.

Vulnerability is the only authentic state and the only appropriate response to pain. Pain isn't asking you to keep a stiff upper lip. It's begging you to draw close; it's wooing you. It was designed to bust the hard outer shell. It must dig you out-either gently, or if it must, with a cruel pick. The soft inner seed was planted to reflect the sky, not the earth. Either way you get there, love's original intent is inescapable: love will always find you. Inside your unwanted and scorned vulnerability, it will find you. It will come to you in the wet gift of your bitter tears and in your surrender to another imperfect soul who might drop you. When you no longer need to be powerful, that is when love can find you.
Love will always make you into what you were meant to be. It is inescapable. And you will be all together lovely, all together worthy of love.     

    
Click here for all of Nina's books: http://www.amazon.com/Nina-Bingham/e/B008XEX2Z0