I’m showing you gentle
In the morning, Adam and I rush out the door on the way to school and I smile at him with his long, twenty-year-old bones and the bud of wisdom in his tender eyes and the snarl of hair at the back of his head where he never brushes, and I think of the strangeness of Autism, how it keeps our kids always bouncing along out of rhythm, their bodies older and also, in some ways, always young. Adam has an ageless soul though, and this is what I see when I look into his eyes and he smiles, and this is what I remember when I sigh over the incongruencies of our life together.
In the car, I hand him the compact hairbrush I keep in the storage beneath my armrest. Reaching toward him, I say, “gently,” just that one word with emphasis, because Adam favors efficiency in speech, and because he knows exactly what I mean when I say that and hand him the brush. Before I started making that stipulation, Adam would rip through the knots in his hair so hard the hair snapped in half. In certain places, that broken hair stood off the back of his head like fluff, like a warning to the compound danger of immaturity and impatience.
The woman who cuts our hair explained it to me, that what I thought to be split ends were, in fact, broken hair shafts with jagged edges. “My guess is, you’re pulling through those tangles a little too fast,” she said to Adam.
Adam gave her a fleeting, sheepish glance, before bending his head. “Ooh, missed it,” he said softly, and I knew this to be a shy admission.
Adam glances at me a moment now, then begins dragging the brush through his hair so slowly I can feel his restraint from where I sit. Adam’s knuckles are white as he holds the brush, and his movements so deliberate, so intentionally careful, so exaggeratedly gentle, as to be comical. I can feel him looking at me as I drive. I can feel him wondering if I see. Look Mom, his eyes say, I’m showing you gentle.
Because I emphasized that one word, Adam will keep brushing in slow motion like this until I tell him it’s okay to stop. I let him go a while; the careful attention makes his hair shine, honey-colored and handsome.
In his book Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund points out that, “when Jesus tells us what animates him most deeply, what is most true of him,” he uses the words gentle and lowly (19). “…for I am gentle and lowly in heart,” Jesus said, “and you will find rest for your souls.” The word translated gentle in that verse is sometimes rendered meek, which over time has been misunderstood as a synonym for weakness and softness, even though the word actually refers to the exercise of great power under careful restraint.
I thought of this just yesterday as a character in an audiobook referred to her father as a “gentle man,” going on to describe him as completely docile and incapable of any kind of forceful action. She said for this reason, her mother had to make all the decisions, and I thought, but that’s not gentleness.
Gentleness is Adam being so deliberately restrained as he uses that hairbrush that he not only doesn’t break the hair, he makes it shine. It’s not that Adam has lost the strength or capacity to rip the hair out of his own head, but that now, for my sake, he intentionally channels all that power into controlling his own strength.
In these times, gentleness may be the forgotten fruit of a life lived in Christ. Certainly, in the past, when I’ve read through the list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, gentleness has been one I’ve tended to gloss over. I can’t say it’s one I’ve ever prayed that God would cultivate in me. If I’m not harsh, I must be gentle, right? That was my thinking. Ooh, missed it.
As I watch Adam now out of the corner of my eye and think about what that word really means as Jesus defines it, I realize that the opposite of gentleness isn’t just roughness, but that more accurately, it’s thoughtlessly wielding whatever power I possess without exercising restraint. Gentleness doesn’t “fly off the handle” or flog someone with unguarded words or flash in sudden anger over someone else’s mistakes. Gentleness doesn’t even give way to the kind of unguarded thoughts that bloom into bitterness. In fact, true gentleness never gives free-reign to any influence or power that could, apart from careful control, do harm.
In describing the justice of Jesus Christ, God said through the prophet Isaiah, “He will not shout or cry out,/ or raise his voice in the streets./A bruised reed he will not break,/and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out (Isaiah 42:2,3).”
It’s that phrase, a bruised reed he will not break, that I hear repeatedly in my mind now as Adam sits beside me, brushing his hair with those endlessly comical, exaggeratedly gentle strokes. It has to hurt Adam’s hand to hold back so much. Certainly, it requires more effort of him to be gentle, more strength, than it did for him to be so carelessly rough.
As we stop at a light, I glance over and Adam smiles at me—see, I’m showing you gentle, and his hand trembles, and he waits. Can I be done? He works so hard at this, I realize, returning the smile, because he loves me.
“Finished?” I say, holding out my hand for the brush.
It’s a wonder of love that it would be the nature of a God so wronged to be so powerfully restrained, so gentle, in His approach to those who have offended Him. Christ never flies off the handle, not the way I do sometimes when I’m tired and someone (like the driver who just this moment blocked three lanes of traffic with his tractor trailer—come on) pushes my buttons, which is why the most broken people in the New Testament felt drawn to Him and safe. I can break bruised reeds before I even recognize the bruises, but Jesus never did. I understand: As God forms me to be more like Christ, He plans to make me gentle too.
Even as I drive, He looks pointedly into my heart and says, “gently.”
