I don’t feel very much like Pooh today,” said Pooh.
“There, there,” said Piglet. “I’ll being you
Tea and honey until you do.”
A.A. Milne
Winnie-the-Pooh
Traveling companions have helped me open back up to life when an event knocked the life out of me. Asking for help is not the easiest thing to do, but the alternative is usually much harder. When things are not well with our hearts, minds, bodies, souls and circumstances, wisdom moves us to search for help. Finding a helpful friend, a therapist, or a twelve-step group, pursing the right medication, joining a meaningful small group, finding an exercise partner are a few of the endless resources available to help us transform the pain into something useful and life-giving.
Pride says, “I can do it on my own.”
Wisdom says, “Find the help you need.”
Sometimes we “come to that place in life where we know all the words but none of the music,” as Sue Monk Kidd did in her forties. During a time when I couldn’t hear the music of hope, my friend Gayle had me write “hope” on a napkin and give it to her. “I will hold this for you as long as you need me to,” she said. More recently, two other friends have been holding hope for me in a similar fashion.
My traveling companions carry me through the darker days, becoming my hope, that “thing with feathers,” poet Emily Dickinson writes about, ‘that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.”
Taken from the book Broken Hallelujahs: Learning to Grieve the Big and Small Losses of Life, by Beth Slevcove, InterVarsity Press, 2016.