They Thought They Were Helping

She loved you and she was trying to help, and it went in like a blade.

That is the whole difficulty in one sentence. If she had been cruel there would be somewhere to put this. Cruelty has a place to go. What you have instead is a wound delivered by somebody whose love for you was not in question, who was worried about you, who said the thing because she could not think what else to do with how much she cared.

So there is no available response. You cannot be angry with her, because she meant well and you know it. And you cannot dismiss what she said, because it came from somebody who knew you.

You have been holding both of those for years and they do not fit in one hand.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have gone at the thing itself for years, in ways she never knew about, and you have gotten up again every single time. Somebody who did not care would have shrugged it off.

So this page is not going to ask you to reinterpret her. She was doing her best and you already know it.

I want to show you a verse about how God handles something that is already bruised.

Both things are true and neither cancels the other

Consider the trap underneath all this, because it is a real logical trap and not a failure of maturity.

The whole thing has been an attempt to resolve it. Either she was wrong, in which case her love does not excuse it, or she was right, in which case there is no complaint to make. That fork has been run at for years and it will not resolve, because both branches are false.

Both things are true. She loved you and the sentence did damage. Those are not in competition and neither one needs to be reduced so the other can stand.

You have two true things rather than a contradiction, and no wound has ever once been erased by the love it arrived inside. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed shall he not break, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person hold two true things without collapsing either one.

And notice what the attempt to resolve it has cost. Every year you have spent trying to decide the question is a year the wound has stayed open, because resolution has been the condition for tending it. And the resolution was never available.

You have been waiting on a resolution before receiving any care, and no injury has ever once had to be adjudicated before God would attend to it. The written word says a bruised reed shall he not break, said about something already damaged and not about something proven, and the Spirit of God is the one who tends before deciding.

A bruised reed shall he not break

Isaiah is describing how the servant of God deals with what is already damaged.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. (Isaiah 42:3, King James Version)

A bruised reed is a broken instrument. A reed is what you make a pipe out of, and a bruised one no longer plays properly. The obvious thing to do with a bruised reed is snap it and get a new one.

He does not. That is the whole verse.

You are a bruised thing that is not going to be broken, and no damaged reed has ever once been discarded by Him. Isaiah 42 describes the treatment of the already-damaged rather than the intact, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that treatment believable to somebody who is used to being handled roughly by her own thoughts.

And read the smoking flax, which is the other image. A wick that is barely alight. The obvious thing is to pinch it out and be done with the smoke.

You have a light that is barely going and it has never once been pinched out, and He has never once put an end to a small flame. The Spirit of God is the one who makes gentleness with something feeble feel like strength rather than like pity, and the written word says the smoking flax shall he not quench.

Say them both out loud

Now the part I came to say.

Say both things. Out loud. In one breath. She loved me and it hurt me. That is the sentence, and saying it out loud is what breaks the fork.

Because a fork only exists in a mind that is trying to choose. Said out loud, as one sentence, the two halves simply sit there next to each other, and the mind stops running at them, and the wound becomes available to be attended to.

You are able to say both halves in one breath, and no sentence with two true things in it has ever once been a contradiction. The written word describes God tending something bruised without any adjudication happening first, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a two-part sentence hold.

And here is why that matters more than being at peace with her. You do not need peace with her to receive care. You may already have peace with her, and the wound may still be open, because they were never connected. The care is available now, unconditionally, on a thing that has not been resolved.

You have care available on something unresolved, and no wound of yours has ever once had to be settled before it could be tended. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that available today rather than after some work, and Isaiah 42:3 is the written word underneath it, where the bruised reed is not broken and the smoking flax is not put out.