When Love Can Only Come So Close

I have known one person who loved God and loved people in the way I always imagined the saints must have.

They would drop everything for anyone. If someone needed the shirt off their back, it was off and handed over before the request was finished. And they had done an astonishing amount of inner work. I don’t think I owned a single book on faith or the heart that they hadn’t already read, underlined, and wrestled with. I’d mention a title and they’d tell me what had challenged them in a particular chapter. They could name their own patterns with a clarity most people never reach.

So at first there was a deep sense of safety. Here was someone who loved Jesus, loved people, and knew themselves. I had eagerness to know them better, and I remember thinking I’d found a place where I could be fully known by them too.

..And that was where the safety ended.

I’m sure everyone has those friendships or even relationships. Where trauma can push away the very people we long to keep close.

I learned that first from my mother. She was terrified of being abandoned. It was under everything she did. And yet her behavior drove nearly everyone away, one after another, until her fear became a kind of prophecy that fulfilled itself. The more frightened she was of being left, the more she acted in ways that made people leave.

Job has a line that has always reminded me of her: “For the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me” (Job 3:25). Job wasn’t the cause of his own suffering, and I’m not suggesting that every fear causes what it dreads. But I’ve watched the pattern often enough to recognize it. The dread doesn’t only anticipate the thing….. sometimes it helps build it.

The story was gentler within this particular person in my story but it felt similar in a lot of ways. They’d been lied to and taken advantage of so deeply, so many times, that a kind of watchfulness had grown up in them. It overshadowed trust. It crept into the spaces where I needed some freedom of my own. I could only be so close, only so open about who I was, before I started to feel as though I was being slowly poisoned by suspicion I hadn’t earned.

What made it so hard to reconcile was that it happened between those who both loved Christ.

We’re supposed to love each other the way He loves us. And I never doubted their care for me– this kind of love was definitely there. It just couldn’t come all the way in, if that makes sense.

Christ was mistreated. But was He wounded the way we are?

I’ve wondered about this a lot. Jesus was lied about, betrayed, abandoned by His friends, tortured, and killed. If anyone had reason to grow guarded, it was Him. And yet He never seems to have become suspicious of the people around Him.

Hebrews tells us that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15). He knows what it is to be hurt by people.

Look at the night of the Last Supper.

John says that Jesus, knowing Judas was about to betray Him, “was troubled in his spirit” (John 13:21). He felt it. And yet, moments earlier, He had knelt and washed Judas’s feet along with everyone else’s. Then He dipped a morsel of bread and handed it to Judas (13:26), which in that culture was a gesture of honor, the sort of thing a host did for a favored guest.

Jesus knew exactly what Judas was. He wasn’t naive. He also wasn’t guarded. He had knowledge of the betrayal and love for the betrayer at the same time.

I think the difference is that Christ’s wounds never distorted Him, because nothing could shake His security in the Father.

He knew where He’d come from and where He was going (John 13:3). His identity didn’t depend on whether people were trustworthy. Ours often does. We don’t have that perfect footing, and so our wounds bend us. It’s just what being a wounded creature in a broken world does.

So how does someone truly own what trauma does to them?

I don’t think owning it means accepting blame for what was done to you. No one would ever choose to be deceived, for example. My mother didn’t choose whatever made her so afraid. But the effects of those wounds, the way they spill onto the people who love us, are still ours to bring to God.

David describes what happened when he wouldn’t do that: “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long… I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin” (Psalm 32:3, 5). Not every effect of trauma is sin… but I think the principle of it still holds. What we keep hidden festers. What we bring into the light can be healed.

And I have to turn this same question on myself.

I have my own hypervigilance. I’ve written about sitting by a window building a case out of someone’s silence. I’m not the healthy one in this story looking down on the wounded one. I’m a different sort of wounded, and I have my own effects to own.

So what about the eggshells?

Loving someone like that meant constantly measuring myself. Holding back parts of who I was. Choosing words carefully, not out of kindness but out of fear of setting off an alarm. Shrinking.

Which then make me wonder: Is that what love requires?

Paul describes Christ’s self-giving this way: “though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6-7). It’s the deepest sacrifice there is.

But notice what Christ didn’t do.

He didn’t stop being God. He emptied Himself of privileges and status, not of His identity. He didn’t pretend to be someone else to make people comfortable. In fact, much of His ministry made people deeply uncomfortable precisely because He kept being exactly who He was.

I think that’s where the line runs. Love sometimes asks me to set aside my preferences, my comfort, my time. It doesn’t ask me to stop being the person God made. Self-giving and self-erasure look similar in principle…. but they aren’t the same.

And it depends, I think, on the kind of friendship or relationship.

As a parent, I’ll gladly give up almost anything for Colin. My free time, my sleep, my hobbies, my plans. If he needs me, I’m there, and I’m happy to be. There’s a limit (at some point I really do have to shower), but I’ll overextend for him without hesitation and without resentment, because that’s what that relationship is.

I wouldn’t do that for a stranger. And every other relationship in my life lands somewhere between those two.

Jesus had the same: He taught crowds of thousands, sent out 72, and chose 12. Of the twelve, He took 3 up the mountain and into the garden. And of those three, one is described as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” He wasn’t equally close to everyone. He couldn’t have been, and He didn’t try.

Paul does the same: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). Everyone, and especially.

So I think the depth of sacrifice a relationship can ask of me is tied to the depth of the covenant it carries.

My son is covenant. A marital relationship is too. A stranger isn’t. A friendship, a dating relationship, a community: each has its own unique weight.

So I don’t think the answer is that people with deep wounds can’t be loved. Of course they can. I don’t think it’s that I should only love people who never make me uncomfortable, either. That isn’t love at all.

But I’ve come to believe that when closeness with someone requires me as a person and my current calling to slowly disappear, and the relationship isn’t one God has bound me to the way He’s bound me to my son, then stepping back can be an act of love too. For them and for me. I’m not their healer. “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3).

That job was never mine.