Heart Sleeve: When dog food commercials make you cry

“I am a human being, therefore nothing human is alien to me.”

–Terentius

“I will weep when you are weeping, when you laugh I'll laugh with you.

I will share your joy and sorrow till we've seen this journey through.”

 –Richard Gillard, The Servant Song

photo © 2007 Brandon Baunach | more info (via: Wylio)
I used to think my mother was overly sentimental. She’d cry over anything remotely sweet. She cried over dog food commercials. It used to drive me nuts. Then I hit puberty. Now I cry, too.

The first time it happened, I was reading Flowers for Algernon and I’d just come to the part where Algernon dies. (Hope I didn’t ruin anything there, it’s been in publication since 1966.) Out of nowhere, my gut wrenched and a sob caught in my throat and my eyes kept spilling tears. I staggered out of my room to find my mother. She was sitting on the couch watching a show on TV.

“Mom,” my breath was ragged, “Algernon died.”

“Who did what, Honey?” She looked up, concerned her daughter was obviously distraught about something, but she had no idea about what.

“The mouse? In the story I’m reading?”

“A-ha…” She still didn’t get it.

“He died, Mom, the mouse died. And it was so awful, they did it to him. It was so mean…” I blathered a bit.

Then that epiphany-face hit. “Honey,” she laid her hand on my forearm, clearly choosing her words carefully, “do you have your period?”

I shook her off in righteous anger, even though it was imminent.

“NO! Don’t you get it? This was so wrong, they shouldn’t have done it. They killed Algernon.”

She looked amused.

I scoffed, stormed off, and slammed my bedroom door behind me.

You’d think of all people she’d understand getting choked up over a story.

What I didn’t understand then was that she completely understood. She knew what it was like to have your emotions on a roller coaster thanks to surging and subsiding hormones within a woman’s body.

It was an important lesson. We don’t just empathize with someone in what they’re experiencing at the moment, but we seek to understand and have compassion for its causes and the ramifications it will have on the rest of their life, and maybe even the lives around them.

I have a friend whose husband is very sick right now. He’s been in the hospital for a few days now and the doctors are having trouble helping him get well. They’ve just moved to a new home, far from their family and support systems. They have a young child. She’s weary and scared and likely thinking about what this means for her family- if he gets better, if he gets partially better, if he doesn’t get better, if he dies. And my heart breaks for her, and all she’s holding.

She’s not the first friend I’ve had to bear such a terrible load, either. And every time these unbearable burdens come I offer them to the only One strong enough to carry them. But offering them up isn’t enough, I don’t think. I think part of my burden, as a friend and as a Christian, is understand what this burden means for my friend’s life. It is part of my burden to weep with them, and to get angry with them. Just like it’s my job to rejoice with my friends when things go well. It’s part of letting another human being we love know, you’re not alone. “Let me be as Christ to you” Richard Gillard says in The Servant Song.

So, today, on my sleeve, I will wear the worry and fear for my friend on my sleeve, alongside the love I have for her and her family, and I will move that arm towards heaven where I will join her in lifting up her burdens.