Who Can Hold Me?

Art is conversation. It’s one heart speaking back to another.

Please enter in with me today with open arms.

Allow yourself the courage and vulnerability to ask yourself this powerful question: Who can hold me?

And to be honest. I keep wavering on whether to share one this with you or not. I published it and then that very night unpublished it. And here I am again, reconsidering the send button. As I ask you to have courage and vulnerability to join me, I realize more than ever how much courage and vulnerability of my own is required to share such things. And yet that still small voice keeps asking me to show up with a gentle, loving heart to a world that doesn’t always know how to carry such things. That still small voice keeps whispering to trust Him, to unleash it. I suppose this tiny font is my quiet plea that you cover me in prayer as I try to obey the Lord’s calling, walking this careful line between what I keep to myself and what I share publicly in my grief. Funny that saying all this brings me right back to the same desperate question…

Who can hold me?

Who can hold me?

When the pressing was unbearable and I felt my body would collapse, you were there. You’d wrap your arms around me, and I knew we’d be ok.

The last time you held me like that—our apartment kitchen. Linoleum floor like the gold streets of heaven. Angels all around us hold that moment in time for me. Your warm embrace. Your scruffy beautiful face. My chest and shoulders ache, without you.

Who can hold me?

“Hold-you-me!” Our two-year old’s phrase that we, like the angels, continued to hold in time as she grew. Won’t you hold-you-me? Please.

Who can hold me?

Before, you and I faced the heartache together. As we hugged, we squelched the heartache into peace. But now, where are you?

Who can hold me?

Then it was over. And they took your flag covered body away. I fell to the earth myself that day. I wept… and I was held.

When I found myself about to collapse in the back of the storage unit, I put my hand against the wall so I would not fall. I wept… and I was held.

Locking up the last place you held me, putting my head on the door and weeping, about to turn in the keys. I wept… and I was held.

When the men carried your old keyboard out of storage into the moving truck, all I could see were ring bearers carrying the casket to the hearse. I wept… and I was held.

When the stage closed, the celebration ended, and I realized that you would not be home waiting for me to debrief about the wonders of my day. I wept… and I was held.

When surrounded with laughter and joy and people on every side, I felt your absence severely. I wept… and I was held.

This is the Body of Christ. The Body who is broken for me. We weep… and we are held.

Who can hold me?

Who can hold me?

That poem was heavily inspired by the song I play on repeat right now. I love every word of this song. I love the purity and the pain in Kara’s voice as she sings it. And I find great relief when someone else can express grief for me. So I sing this song often.

My best friend said it sounds sad and hopeless. I smiled. Oh, how it comforts me.

My daughter asked me once while I was making dinner, “Mommy, why do you sing that song so much?” I explained the ways it comforts me.

But I think I also sing these words as a rhetorical question, a remembrance, a form of hope for the future, a form of prayer.

Lord, who can hold me?

It’s an honor to share with you these precious lyrics, this beautiful song: