The Danger of Expecting To Be Understood

I remember a conversation I had, many years ago, with a friend who was experiencing a deep trial.  It seemed that at every turn, someone was accidentally saying or doing something that opened new wounds for them.  In frustration, they said to me, “People don’t understand!”   And I couldn’t argue.  Their unique trial was something I barely understood myself.  Yet those words have haunted me for well over a dozen years:  “People don’t understand!” 

 Sometimes we don’t understand because we are thoughtless.  Pride is clumsy and unwieldy in the presence of injury, like a freshman medical student doing brain surgery.  Certainly we have all been bruised by the careless advice of friends who assumed they understood our hurt, who thought they were experts at our trial just because of their keen observation skills.   We timidly unveiled our hurts or fears, and they swooped in like barking sea gulls at a picnic, offering to sell us a health product, or sharing some inspirational tidbit they read on Facebook.  Like the Lawn Chair Drone that surprisingly penetrated White House security fencing, the most inept among us somehow manage to stumble wildly into the enclosed places of our hearts that wise friends gently leave alone.   Sometimes, thoughtlessness really is a punishable crime. 

 But there are times in life when even good people just can’t understand.  They have never been “us.”  We try to explain.  We feed them lots of articles and “raise awareness.”  We educate everyone around us on our needs, and we judiciously seek to protect ourselves from misunderstanding.  But try as they might, a hundred articles and a hundred conversations later, even the best among us still don’t get it. 

 If we are not careful, Danger slithers into a comfortable resting spot and lurks silently, buried underneath our search for understanding.  Ever watchful, he waits patiently for his opportunity to strike.   A wrong word, a misplaced question, or a missed phone call on a tough day, and he will uncoil and punish with venom that will take everyone by surprise.  Suddenly, they will learn what pain is all about!  Now we can all be miserable together. 

Bitterness.  The word itself rattles and hisses. 

The cool shade of loneliness in suffering that was meant to be a sanctuary where no one could find us but Jesus has now become the swampy headquarters of an enemy who wants us dead.  A soft bed of rotting leaves and humus should have made a couch, hidden behind the brush and weeds, concealing us from the curious and the careless.  In the murky shade where no one could see, we would meet the One whose nail prints are still a mystery to us.  And there in our dark place, the One Who has never been understood would understand. 

But instead, we often give our shady spot away to the serpent.  Sitting on the prickly briars of unmet expectations, we trade healing for accusations.  In the words of a man well-acquainted with bitterness, “They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.”  From his make-shift seminary next to a withered gourd,  Jonah admonishes us four thousand years later:  Bitterness may seem to be your right, but that’s poison you’re drinking.

We all live with the fact that others truly don’t always understand.  Awkward questions; the noisy silence of a mind racing for answers in a funeral home; clichés that crash across our pain; an empty mailbox that reminds us that other lives have moved on:  Those are the mossy branches and the grape vines that overarch your precious shady spot. 

Don’t let the serpent steal your spot.  You have a Friend waiting there, underneath the quiet umbrella of loneliness and misunderstanding. 

 

 

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