let me
“I want to take care of you. Let me,” my friend says, pressing a lunch into my hands, even though it’s the last one she could eat and instead, she’ll be eating almonds and apricots from the stash she keeps in her purse. She doesn’t know she’s preaching. Here we are, the two of us at a training event where both of us have things to say, and she cares more about my nourishment than her own.
God gives grace, and that grace allows us to give to each other. “You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion,” Paul promised the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 9:11). My friend gives to me out of the grace God has given to her. It’s not the first time God has multiplied the gift of a lunch.
A moment ago, while I gulped air trying to breathe in a whirlwind of chaos–all the last-minute-before-the-event proof of human limitation, my friend stopped to give me a hug. You know that moment, when technology fails and questions keep coming from every side, and all our careful plans seem to go awry? That’s the moment when she saw me, when she stood still and put her arms around me, as if to say that the most important thing there ever is to do is to love each other. I suddenly saw the evidence of a truth that planted me, rooted me, grounded me solid.
I had confessed to her in friend speak, coming out of that hug, that I had been trying to handle all the things.
She laughed, said, “I know,” and gestured to more friends working nearby. “But you don’t have to, because you’ve got us.”
So I relent now and take the lunch, drawing a chair up to the tiny table where our friends have begun to gather, thinking it may well be one of the hardest choices in love, to let someone else take care of you.
We build relationships on giving and receiving, both as an action of surrender, both by the grace God has given us. The King of Kings gave his life, and while He was here, He also allowed other people to help him. Jesus asked the woman at the well for a drink. He asked Peter, James, and John to keep watch with Him and pray. He sent his disciples to prepare the upper room.
Love is not transactional, but it is reciprocal grace, and to grace we are all daily debtors. We all get to be emptied and we all get to be filled, or, to paraphrase Bob Goff’s allusion to the gospels (see Matthew 8:28-34), sometimes I get to be freed from my demons, and sometimes I’m the guy with the pigs (Everybody Always).
“I want to take care of you; let me,” seemed to be Jesus’ implication when He insisted on washing Peter’s feet (John 13), and it was most certainly the message of the cross. Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.
I pop the top on my salad and drizzle on the dressing, thinking about how much I struggle to admit my own vulnerability, even to myself, thinking how often that brokenness shows up. I will say I don’t want to burden anyone else, which presupposes that needing other people isn’t an inherent part of being human, that I could somehow reach such a level of competency and self-reliance that I give generously and sacrificially without ever requiring the gifts of others myself. But then Paul writes, “Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God (2 Corinthians 3:5),” and I remember that even my own competency, what competency actually exists, comes as a gift of grace. What is my agency in my own salvation after all, what was my first taste of grace, except an honest admission of need and the decision to let God love me?
I glance at my friend, who loves to give, who right now sits beside me plucking sun-orange apricots from a plastic bag, realizing she’s ahead of me in sketching out the edges of love, ahead of me in this specific healing, because she’s not afraid to admit that she can’t just give; she also needs to receive.
“I need friends who will also take care of me,” she often says simply, not in weakness, but in strength, with a wisdom not her own and absolutely not of this world.
