protective
Unprotected, that’s the word my friend chooses. I feel unprotected.
I cradle my coffee mug, sipping, immediately drawn to that word as my mind spins to its opposite, making a connection, like a jagged line across the page. My friend has been describing a problematic relationship, how vulnerable she feels every time the potential for conflict arises, how this makes her stumble over doubts and second guess.
I think of stego, that word used in the New Testament to describe love, how it bears all things, how it protects by covering, like a roof. I think of something David the poet-King wrote often in his songs, about how God’s steadfast love preserves him.
In our time, the word protection, like all good things, has been twisted and weaponized, used in place of control, as an excuse for manipulation. I only want to protect you.
And, especially because of abuses, we can believe the need for protection implies some lack of agency, even though the English word we use, protect, started out as a word for warriors, marrying the Latin prefix pro, meaning “in front of or before,” to tegare, meaning “to cover”. To protect someone means to cover them from the front, like a shield bearer, like a sister-in-arms fighting out ahead, so that they can fight victoriously, from a position of strength.
“I know in my mind that intentions are good. Everyone’s intentions are good,” my friend says, carefully settling her own mug on the table beside her. She looks at her empty hand, flexes her fingers. “But I just can’t convince myself things are going to be okay.”
We can mean well and still leave each other vulnerable to attack.
We should pray for protection in our relationships, I remember Zoe saying to me in a spurring conversation just last week. We should pray, because there is an undeniable agenda aimed at disunity and isolation.
I’m beginning to see not just a thread, but an emerging picture.
“Hold up,” I say to my friend, stilling myself to listen. “God is…doing a thing.”
I have my own wary interactions to consider, my own doubts and rapid conclusions, my own people I’ve no doubt left feeling unprotected.
My friend grins, reaches to take up her coffee again. I watch the steam curl and ascend, dissipating as a realization settles.
“What if…we entered our interactions with each other alert to the fact that spiritual warfare is real?”
If I know there’s a war on against an actual enemy who comes to kill, and steal, and destroy, how does that change my approach to relationships?
Wouldn’t I want to protect you?
It’s only when my friend and I hit the rapids now that I remember we’re bobbing in God’s river together, like a couple of girls with pigtailed hair, dangling our feet and hands over the sides of our innertubes. It’s as though a refreshing splash has just doused us both. She laughs a little, sipping, tickled by that steam, warmed by the feel of the mug in her hands.
A verse keeps flitting through my mind as we talk, an imperative.
Encourage one another daily, so that your hearts will not be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.
Encouragement, or, to literally render that Greek word, calling from up close, seems to be a strategy for mutual protection. It’s like the moment when someone who knows you intimately, sees you fully, and loves you deeply softly calls you back to the truth just by saying your name. I think of Mary in the garden, not recognizing the resurrected Christ beside her until he says, “Mary.” Encouragement sounds like that, like the voice of Christ calling from up close, though it comes from the mouth of a friend, more like that than some sort of compliment. There’s nothing quite so protective of the softness of a heart than the knowledge that we are seen and known and loved, from up close, because there’s something so vulnerable and threatening about being held at a distance.
“Well, I think it means we say the things,” my friend says, responding to my question, her chin still half-hidden behind the mug, “because it’s not always that we say the wrong thing. Sometimes it’s that we say nothing.”
Fictions are written all over our silences. Silence is the kind of response that can strip a person bare.
“And it also means we say them from up close,” I say, thinking of the spatial implications of both words, suggesting that our healthy protectiveness originates in intimacy, which is important, especially in an age when virtual connection has become a substitute for proximity.
But what, when it comes to our protection, is truly at stake? Putting Paul’s imperative in context, not merely how we feel in our relationships with one another, conflict or no, but ultimately, the perseverance of our faith in Christ and our testimony about Him as protector. In Paul’s writing about spiritual warfare, faith is the shield we bear, and so, protective encouragement, then, isn’t merely talk about faith, but upholding faith from up close, on behalf of an injured and hurting friend.
My friend and I sit back, feeling afresh the weight, still more, the joy, of our responsibility to each other. Ours are to be lives of protective love, love like God’s, protective of others the way Christ has always been protective of us.
For a moment, we just sit, two friends, two sisters, receiving, holding our coffee mugs in our hands, wide-eyed and comfortably quiet, and then we glance at each other and grin.
