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When Someone You Love Is Struggling

Let them wrestle.


If you love someone who is struggling, your place is a support role, and that’s hard to figure out. A shift happens when someone is ready to leave crisis mode, crawling and clawing their way out of the hard and dark places in their life. They are focused on taking the next step because that’s all they can handle. It might look like selfishness, but it’s strategic to go from crawling to standing.


Let them flail as they figure out how to flourish and what they need most in this season of their life. Give them the tender space to relearn what feeling everything looks like after being numb for so long. They’ve lived in the I’m not enough-ness of seasonal relationship disorders where the only way they can survive is to go numb and check out. They’ve spent themselves to the point of burnout and exhaustion trying to make everyone happy.


As they come back to life, or even come back to you, they feel like they’re too much and oversharing. Let them be both—not enough and too much. They know how to be small, keep their heads down, and take the hits. But one day they’ll learn how to be bold. That will scare you just as much as their silence did when they were numb. But trust me, the too much-ness scares them more than it does you.


I love how this wrestling match played out in Genesis 32: 22-32. Jacob sends the ones he loves to the other side of his pain to be alone in the dark to wrestle it out with God. Maybe he knew he had to do the hardest parts without the ones he loved watching because they would have stepped in and tried to tell him how to do it.


Let them wrestle.


Let them limp because it means they won.

Jacob saw God face-to-face because he was tenacious enough to do the hard work of not letting go of the only thing that works — God’s faithfulness and his more than enough-ness.


It’s okay to get all of this wrong because you will. No one handles a crisis well. We simply walk with one another in the places where we can… and let them do the hard things we can’t do for them alone. We wait for them on the other side of their pain and release our death grip on the way we think their healing journey should play out.


They might look frail to you and war-torn, but I bet you money this battle isn’t strong enough to overpower them. I love a good underdog because their pain always takes them to places where they will have the greatest influence. Those are the crazy ones who don't wait for the smoke to clear before they look for survivors and soon-to-be thrivers.


Keep going, beloved.


After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

 Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” (Gen 32: 22-32)

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