When I was a teenager, my grandparents got a small dog from an animal shelter in Central Florida. At first, we thought the dog, which we named Muffin because of her sandy-colored hair, was part Bassenji, because she did not bark at all. After about a week, though, Muffin barked for the first time, and upon realizing that she would not be hit, proceeded to be a very noisy dog, barking at people coming in the yard, barking Amen to prayers at the dinner table, and not just barking in one way but being expressive in a wide variety of ways. Simply put, far from being a dog that didn’t bark, she was a dog that simply could not stay quiet. This might have been a problem in some families, but given that I grew up in a family that required one to be very loud and forceful if one wanted to be heard, Muffin fit right in with the rest of us. She was a loud dog, and a very clever one, who needed to know that she was safe before she could show her true nature.

I often wonder if my grandparents had some kind of intuitive judgment that might be the case, for it was at least their second time seeing that phenomenon. About ten years before, my grandparents had welcomed their second daughter back into their house, leaving an unhappy and deeply troubled marriage with two small children, the older age three and the younger age eighteen months. At first, they thought the sandy-haired older child was quiet, being silent and not talking much. Soon, though, they realized that this intensely nervous child was not a quiet child at all, but once he started talking did not really know how to keep silent all that well but was a very chatty person. That child was me. Knowing myself as well as I do, I can infer a lot by the fact that I was quiet when I arrived in Florida, for I am only quiet when something is deeply troubling that cannot easily be formed into words. Otherwise, I am a babbling brook or a fountain bursting forth with what is inside. So, perhaps it was more than mere happenstance that my grandparents adopted a dog that had much of the same psychology that I did. To be sure, Muffin was far easier to socialize than I was, for I always viewed the obvious concern and scrutiny of my grandparents to my gentle and tender behavior with my younger cousins with alarm and suspicion, feeling that they considered me as somewhat deviant merely for being extremely gentle and affectionate, and strongly resenting it.

Over and over again in life I have found myself drawn to a particular type of people, and it has been, so far, the source of a great deal of complication. Yet this particular type has not always been easy to recognize until after the fact, for it is defined by a set of qualities rather than any one solitary factor. When I find out the sort of people that have touched my heart, after the fact, I can often find a strong set of qualities that, taken together, exists very frequently. Given the general results of that sort of vulnerability, namely a lot of drama and difficulty, and quite frequently a lot of unintentional suffering, it is worthwhile to examine where the source of difficulty and vulnerability lies, so that we may at least know what requires attention to deal with and what we can pass over in silence and not worry about particularly deeply.

A good example of the sort of person who touches my heart is the three year old daughter of one of my close friends. Although I tend to lack strong instincts for self-preservation, I tend to be very strongly moved to behave in a protective attitude towards others who need the protection. Likewise, I have a strong emotional sensitivity to people whose lives have taken similar courses to my own, or have similar longings for gentle affection and attention. In the case of my young friend, we have a girl who is very tender and sensitive, to the point of occasional moodiness, a certain fussiness about life, including a great love of using many napkins. At times she loves playing with my tie at church, or commenting that I am hairy because of the stubble on my face. In many ways I look at her (and her siblings) and remember how it was for me as a small child growing up in a small town with my grandparents and being slightly feral. I look, in other words, with a great deal of empathy at someone who has experienced something that I have.

In my life, I face a conundrum as old as the first castle builders, or those who put the famous wall around the city of Jericho and other cities like it. As human beings, we face impossible choices and dilemmas on a regular basis. We (and others) possess free will, and sometimes that free will will be used for harm. Because we have chosen to decide good and evil for ourselves, none of us can feel entirely safe with others, nor even with ourselves. So we build walls to try to protect our vulnerable areas of life from the accidental or intentional harm that comes from others, or ourselves. Yet we do not wish to be isolated and lonely, so we have gates to our fortresses of the heart or the city [1] to allow for limited access in and out. From time immemorial these gates have been the weak point of any fortress, and yet without them a fortress would be useless, a mere asylum and grave for the souls trapped there doomed to a miserable and lonely death. It is also the gates where the transactions of life, the trade and business and communication, pass through that make a castle a place of importance, even at some cost to its defensibility.

When my father died in early 2006 from a heart attack, it took me a long time to piece together the harm he had done by walling his emotions in his heart so as to protect others. Having greatly harmed others through lack of impulse control (an irritating problem in a small child, an unacceptable one in a powerful man nearly six feet tall), his solution of keeping it all bottled up inside ensured a short and lonely life. Yet if we cannot trust our own restraint, or trust the compassion and understanding of others (for my father, for all of his serious sins, was a man worthy of compassion, a man both sinned against and sinning), then we have no good options. All good outcomes in life require outside help, a circle of friends to provide encouragement and accountability, a loving physical and spiritual family and caring community to do the same, the indwelling presence of God’s Spirit to give us wisdom and strength where we naturally do not possess it, besides the God-given resources we possess ourselves. Without the help of others we are left to our own devices, and they simply cannot cope with the horrors that we have to endure, or the incredible folly that marks the course of our lives.

When my father was a high school senior, he wrote down in his yearbook that he preferred the company of cows (of which there were many, for my father’s family is a farming one) to that of women. Perhaps then, and definitely later, the comment became a source of intense and hurtful ridicule, but my father’s meaning, seen in the course of his life, was a plain one. He preferred the company of animals not for immoral purposes, but rather for their simpler emotional needs. Cattle are placid animals without a great deal of drama, and that is precisely how my father liked it. As someone who struggled with his own emotional needs and how to deal successfully with the heart, he was ill-equipped to be understanding and compassionate with the emotional needs of others. So, quite predictably, he gravitated to areas of life where this crippling difficulty would be less painful, spending as much time as possible with self-help books or on tractors or around cows. Aside from driving school buses, a career that might have been somewhat stressful but was inherited from his father, his life seldom entangled him in the emotional problems of those outside of his close family, and even these were immensely stressful matters to him.

Knowing what makes me vulnerable has not helped matters. How is one to deal with this in a way that brings happiness to life, success to one’s endeavors, the building of godly and appropriate relationships, and service to others? The vulnerability can be watched, but all this does is to note the sorts of people with whom one is likely to intersect in dramatic ways, and this does little help as some of the knowledge is unlikely to occur without spending the time with someone that makes the vulnerability plain to ourselves and to just about everyone else who witnesses and hears of it. One can exercise heroic restraint, but while this is necessary to protect others and ourselves, it does not bring about happiness or joy in doing what is grimly necessary. Ultimately, our happiness must come from having the right opportunities, from being fortunate enough when our lives intersect with those whose longings and ours combine in compatible ways, where there is godly character and a mutual devotion to doing the right thing and communicating in love and understanding on a regular basis, and from stirring up good deeds and acts of service. Such a gift can only come from God, and we can easily screw it up. Will I see such providence for myself in my own life, and am I ready to recognize it and to seize the opportunity if it should arrive? I suppose only the course of life can reveal it for sure.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/close-the-gate-to-the-city/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/unless-the-lord-the-city-keeps-the-military-insight-of-psalm-127/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/a-fortress-around-your-heart/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/the-fortress-as-death-trap/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/dig-in/