Quiet time, morning stories, breakfast, med distribution, quick load of laundry, first of 9000 loads of dishes, then I, with all my parenting wisdom and love turn on the electronic babysitter. Thank God for Netflix!
Now my time to check news and social media for extremely pressing and life shattering important information (said with sarcasm). Sad isn't it that my initial guard is cynicism and distrust? Thankfully this is just an initial somewhat subconscious emotion meant to protect my heart and mind from the ugly I am certain to see. Shaking that junk off I read on about lions, babies both born and unborn, bombs, emails, disease, murders, and a blip of hope thrown in for good measure. What would this all be without a flood of opinions in short an long form? I skim and few and skip a few. My heart is a mess and my mind is spinning once again. This is the world in which we live.

My mind settles as my heart calms and I am reminded of a precious young girl that came to live with us for a while. She was one of our first teenage foster children. She was hurting from years of unimaginable pain. Her coping mechanism was to harm herself. She once told me that if she did it first then it hurt less when others did it. Trying to keep her from hurting herself was a full time job but the effort and time were nothing compared to the ache in my heart for her. Oh how badly I wanted to take her pain away, to erase evil memories and rewrite her story. I watched as she progressed in her anorexia nervosa, continued to cut and sank deeper in her depression. In my house, in my care, even with my love she still hurt. I couldn't rewrite her story or take away her past hurts but I could give her my love. A love that was true and unconditional and would never end. This love did not cure her. It did however heal a place in both of our hearts unknown to either of us.

You see she was right in a way, if we hurt ourselves first it hurts less when others hurt us. We throw up our cynicism guard walls of protection unaware of how we are hurting ourselves and others. What if I would have read the news this morning with no walls? Very likely I would have been in tears, enraged, shocked, and just gone back to bed. My walls were my coping and in fact are an okay coping but nonetheless a coping mechanism. We all use them. Some are healthy and keep us safe and some are destructive with painful results. The news I read and the opinions plastering social media are just that. Coping. Not one of us can look at the world today and not be shaken. We all need to cope.
My hope is that we can love with a genuine and transparent love that breaks down walls and builds one another up and remember that everyone has a story that behind their walls.

See beyond!