When he was little, my son would run to me when he was hurt. Any type of pain flung him right into my arms. Scraped knee, scratched elbow, bump on the head — he believed I was the one to run to when life gave him a beating.

But once he turned five, something changed. Somewhere along the way, his reaction when he was hurt became to withdraw. To not want to be held, to not want to run into my arms. It hurt me deeply. I realized that his inner dialogue had established new rules of engagement: When I hurt, I don’t want to be held.

The day I recognized this shift was a day of deep revelation of how I was keeping myself from encountering the goodness left even in the mess of my suffering and pain.

I think back to the times when being held by God was the last thing I wanted.

Swim Upstream

There is a weariness that comes from fighting to stay tender in a world bent on making us hard. We grow weary of choosing to forgive when what we want is vengeance. We grow weary of fighting to see the good when it seems our skepticism has veiled our eyes. We grow weary of hoping when all hope seems lost. And we can, in our weariness, consider staying soft to be just another thing we say but don’t fight to do.

Yes, it takes courage to stay soft.

Yes, we must resist the urge to rip our hearts out of the Savior’s palm and shield them by our own means. But the true fight we will find ourselves engaging in time and time again is the fight to revive the miracle of being made and being kept soft. lf we’re not careful, we can begin to believe that our softness is a credit to ourselves and not the miracle of God in our lives. lf we’re not careful, we will echo the philosophy of the world: that the worst things that have happened to us made us strong through making us soft. That we, in our own resolve, carry a tenderness that makes us exceptional. But to claim such things is to reject the miracle that God is touching our hearts after the worst things have happened.

The truth about our tender hearts is they are made when we come to the end of ourselves. A tender heart is not what we create in and of ourselves. When our self-righteousness, our cynicism, our withholding of forgiveness, and our self-reliance cannot protect or produce a tender heart, we must admit our need for a miracle — and that can only come from outside ourselves.

The hammer of life that comes down on us beats us for the sake of beating us. Life will pound us into a pulp without rhyme or reason, leaving us reeling and asking why. Life doesn’t care about the outcome of each blow. But God, in His goodness and mercy, offers us a remedy for the senselessness. The pain will come, the hurt will happen, but by the grace of God, we can be made tender by the very things that could make us tough. God will always meet us in our pain, and what we might see as senseless, He can transform into invitations to be made soft.

It’s never an accident to arrive at the end of a day, at the end of a season, at the end of a life with a heart that is soft toward God and humanity. It’s not happenstance but a willingness to allow God to enter the rooms we’ve locked and touch the sin we’ve justified.

Charaia Rush shares more of her story this Wednesday on LIFE TODAY. Excerpted from Courageously Soft by Charaia Rush. Copyright ©2024 by Charaia Rush. Published by Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Used by permission.