A friend recently pointed out that we are givers or takers. Overall, I think I am a giver. Except when I go home to my parents' house where I become a taker, like the child I really am.
It is so nice to go there. Meals are provided, my bed and pots of coffee are made, and towels are set out. With chocolates. Like VIP treatment at a fancy hotel, I imagine...
We often hear it said that "it is better to give than to receive." But, if we don't learn how to receive, we remain poorer than we ought. Not only that, but we increase the poverty of the giver. For they are deprived of the joy of giving and the satisfaction of a gift well-received.
I think one of the whole points of living, beyond knowing, loving, and serving God, is to grow the other side of yourself. Takers must learn how to give and givers must learn how to receive.
I realize that some of the greatest tension in my life comes when I am unable to love people the way I want to. Because they are unable to receive it. Walls are built for self-protection and fortified through the years. Efforts to become invisible are rewarded with invisibility, and intimacy keeps paying the bill that never shrinks.
As I make my way from Kansas to Texas, from the family I was born into to the family that gives life to me daily, I look for silver linings. (I wonder if this is also something I have learned or if I have always been this way.) As I see it, the silver lining is that aging brains and bodies, disability, and decline help us shift the eternal balance between giving, taking, and receiving. The side we keep in the shade is forced into the sunlight and given one option only.
Grow.
These hard things disguised as ugliness and decay are more like old friends coming unbidden - to help you move your old upright piano, because you can't move it by yourself. And they're glad to do it.
