Tender strength

A year ago today, on my usual route to pick up the kids from Grandma’s house, a woman driving in the opposite direction passed out at the wheel, crossed the double yellow lines, and hit our van head-on on the driver’s side. It happened so suddenly, I didn’t even have time to react. 

Miraculously, I walked away with only neck and shoulder pain from the impact, arms scraped and burned from the deployment of the air bag, and brief loss of vision in one eye, which earned me a series of CT scans.

In the days after the accident, everyone around me ensured I was able to rest my body as much as possible, as they kept me on a steady rotation of ice, heat, and ibuprofen. 

My mind and heart, however, could-not-would-not rest. I felt a compulsive need for constant vigilance, but my jumbled mind and injured body were too weak to stand guard. They whirred on with a heightened sense of danger that I was powerless to shake.

After a few days, I worked up the courage and the neck rotation (or was it just that I was sick of not being able to do things for myself?) to make the familiar mile-and-a-half drive to pick up groceries, a trip I had insisted to my many eager “in-home nurses” that I make by myself. 

That first solo drive after the accident felt harrowing. Every car seemed too close for comfort. My mind was in overdrive, formulating contingency plans to defend against all manner of unpredictable behavior from every driver I passed. I crawled into my space in the grocery pickup aisle, heart pounding and completely exhausted. The very nice teenaged employee who loaded my groceries, bless him, did not seem put off by the weary tears rolling steadily down my cheeks as I rested my head on the steering wheel. 

On the short drive home, I prayed through tears, “Is it going to be like this forever? Am I stuck here? I know it could have been so much worse, but I’m frustrated by how hard this is. Everything about me is weak right now—my body, my mind, my emotions. I need you to be strong for me. Help me see you being strong for me.”

As Matt and my mom unloaded my groceries and put them away, I collapsed onto the couch. 

With a peppy “Hi, Mom!”, our then four-year-old plopped down next to me, then remembering Daddy’s repeated instructions to “be gentle with Mom,” he gingerly snuggled in next to me.

“Does it hurt today, Momma?”, he asked timidly as he ran his fingers over the bandaging protecting the burned areas on my wrist. 

With reassuring smile and a little squeeze, I replied, “Yeah, sweetie, it does.”

Eyes focused intently on my wrist, he asked, “Can I see it?”

Since it was nearly time to change my bandages anyway, I said, “Sure, buddy, but it’s kind of yucky.” If you can believe it, this only increased his little-boy interest.

I slowly unwound my bandage, wincing with each turn around my wounded wrist.

We both looked at my arm, still red and throbbing. I let out a long sigh.

Then he put his hand on my cheek, turned my face to his, and looked right in my eyes. 

“Momma, can I kiss your hurt places?”

I started to object—“Oh, sweetie, that’s so kind, but you really don’t have to. It’s too gross...”—but he was already grabbing my hand and lifting my wrist to those perfect little lips that I haven’t been able to get over since the day he was born. 

With such gentleness, he gave me the lightest, most tender butterfly kiss right on my tattered, raw skin.

And in that moment, He caught my eye. I saw him—God, my Strength—seeing me.

I had asked God to be strong for me, hoping that his strength in my weakness would look like me feeling strong in spite of all that had happened. 

But that day he reminded me that his strength is displayed not just in the removal of my “thorn in the flesh,” but through his tenderness toward me in the midst of weakness that can’t be willed away.

So often, we imagine God’s promised strength in our weakness to look like a miraculous overcoming, a supernatural ability to keep going at our normal capacity and pace despite our crippling circumstances, the ability to muscle through traumatic experiences, injury, and anxiety as others look on in wonder, saying, “You’d never know she was in a car wreck just days ago!”

His strength in our weakness does not look like the world’s idea of strength, strength that we are able to draw from our own selves as the source, independent of God or anyone else. The “power of Christ resting on [us]” like Paul talks about in 2 Cor. 12 gives a strength that allows us to know first-hand the touch of a loving Father tending to our hurt places. His tender strength has the power to make us more tender toward him, attaching us to him in trust that we might say with the psalmist:

“My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me” (Ps. 131).

His power resting on us in weakness look less like “You’d never guess…” and more like a Spirit-fed ability to stop squirming and sit still in our weakness long enough to receive what he might have for us in and because of weakness, whether that weakness is temporary or here to stay until we are made new in his presence.

God’s strength displayed in his great tenderness toward us is making a people who are able to echo the words of Jesus, saying in childlike trust, “Your will be done.” 

A year later, I am able to drive now without a pounding heart and the assumption that every other car on the road is an imminent threat to my safety. After months of PT, I can turn my head without actively thinking about it. The experience has shaped me in some ways that I will have to heal from, and in some ways that are very good. I am grateful for the measure of healing to my body and mind that God has given. 

But as I my hands move through the ordinary moments of my days—scratching backs during bedtime prayers, cutting veggies for dinner, switching laundry into the dryer, reading a book out on our front porch—I notice the slightly darker patch of skin on my wrist that marks the place where the air bag hit me in the moment when one of my deepest anxieties was realized. 

But this patch of skin also tells a different story, truer and more lasting, marking the place where God kissed my hurt places, meeting my weakness with his tender strength. 

Thanks be to God.