Going straight to the embrace

I was listening to a podcast this morning in which Jen Hatmaker, whom I love, was talking via telephone interview to Barbara Brown Taylor, whom I am also coming to love.  After an hour of deep conversation, Jen got choked up and began to cry. And the response of her guest was to say, “When we meet this summer, we can go straight to the embrace.” That struck me. These two ladies had never met, but they had shared so much of their hearts in the hour prior that they, upon first time meeting face to face, could “go straight to the embrace.”

How many people are you comfortable with going straight to the embrace?  For many, it’s a very select few. 

I’m a person with pretty high physical touch boundaries.  I shake hands which I’m mostly okay with but it’s a learned rather than a natural response. I do not like to be hugged or squeezed or otherwise handled by people I don’t know pretty well. Even casual unexpected touch is something I don’t typically like if it’s from someone I don’t consider a close friend. I do give side hugs to people I care about. I even give frontal hugs to people that I love. But to actually fully embrace someone is very, very rare. To reach out to someone, or to let them reach out to me, and to actually hold them or allow myself to be held is a big, big deal. It takes a significant amount of trust and vulnerability. And yet when I allow that to happen, a piece of me heals.  Every time. 

Despite my general reticence with close physical contact, when I think of the moment when my time here on Earth is done, the thing I look forward to the most is to walk straight into the embrace of Jesus. I don’t think that’s one I’m ever going to want to step out of. Because even though it will be our first time to meet face to face, I have shared so much of my heart with my Jesus, not over an hour, but over my lifetime, that it will be going home.

Until then, I think I’m going to make an effort to be a little more vulnerable and a little more trusting and a little more willing to embrace others who may need to feel a piece of home themselves before the time they meet Jesus face to face. I pray that God may use me to help someone else to stick the pieces of themselves back together again in a way that only He can do.