Peace for you today, dear soul. Today, we drink from a story titled, Hugs Past Due. This is a story about a child. And what it means for us to be there for them in their precious season of dawn.
HUGS PAST DUE
He was maybe 17. Lean and anxious. Something as big as his whole life was building in his chest, verging on eruption, seeping like sandalwood from his skin. I had just shared a message with an audience in California. Now a long line a souls was blessing me one by one. We were all looking into each other deeply through teary eyes. Spilling lake water over each other. Smiling our spirits toward each other, Love offerings. Strong embraces. Expressions from the heart. Stories. This was a moment of the kind for which I live. Mutual ministering.
And there he was. At the back of the line, fidgeting, his hands up in his hair, over his face, willow branches moving in his breeze of inner chaos. His body clearly electrified. Dancing and shifting like a boxer, hot coals taunting beneath his feet. He was the last one in line. I could hear him: “I don’t know what to say to him.” Others were encouraging him, keeping him in line. He was a nervous colt ready to bolt away. Finally, no one was left in line. Just he and I—a vessel waiting to be filled by a child needing to pour. He bolted. Literally ran out of the room. The moment too much. I needed him though. I ran after. Tracked him down back in the main ballroom where the event was still happening. He was collapsed into a chair at one of the round tables. His head dropped, buried in his hands in a wild assembly of emotions. Defeat. Despair. Frustration. Fear. He must have felt that he was so close and had blown it.
I needed him though. I came to him, kneeled down by his side. My hand on the back of his neck, gently. I whispered close and low: “Brother, it would mean a lot to me to have the chance to meet you.”
He shook his head, like he was fighting off himself more than me. Fighting off the pitch call, wanting to throw a fastball and not a curve. Too much unknown in a curve. I could feel him, hear him, imploring himself: “Don’t do it. Don’t open your heart to this. Not again.”
I felt the combat in his heart. It was a searing aura. I whispered all the sincerity I could muster: “It would be an honor for me to meet you. Let’s go outside. I want you to teach me. Bless me, please.”
Something shifted in him. Young bear decided to leave the cave. Still without ever making eye contact with me, he rose, slow motion as in a dream, and walked toward the door. We emerged into sunlight. Though 500 souls were gathered inside, none came out during the entire time he and I were standing in a dream. The moment became our oasis. Grace had cleared our space.
Face to face. His quaking and stuttering escalated. Fingers back into his hair, needing something to touch, move, control. This is out of control. He worked hard to say it. The thing. A lifetime of being him. The fliers he never got to pass out that said, THIS IS WHAT I’M FEELING. Never got to pass them out because we, this world, never granted him a permit. He started by asking me trepid but determined questions. Sacred questions. He wanted to know if he was the only one. To be like this. As I answered and reassured, he looked at me. Looked lethally into my eyes, a predatory bird whose life depends on clearly seeing its prey. His prey being a moment of honesty from an adult. A word of sincerity. His soul left his shell and came over to me. Only because he needed to look inside me and know that I was being real with him.
Finally, we arrived at the Purpose and Reason for our meeting in this world. Still stuttering, he released it: “When you were speaking to the audience, you said you got to meet your father.”
Now I know this moment.
He pushed out his words, his body ever electric. He was in the avalanche, riding its wave. “You said you got to hug your father. And… and… I got angry because I… I never got to hug my father.”
The moment became a dream that no human can weave. Dream Weaver made the air thick around us. Time slowed, expired, evaporated. Gone. I was a soul standing before a child. A child performing an absolute miracle. Asking for something always denied. Never granted. Request refused. And yet, holding a pile of rejection letters 17 years high, he pushed out the words. Defeated his fear. Forced himself to move. To move his body toward me. He said, “Could you… could you…” He never finished the words. Because now I knew. And it began. The unreal dream, truer than a person who does not dream.
Now I know what I am here for.
He forced his body forward. Made his adolescent male ego submit to his child heart. He came to me. His head found my chest. My heart built a home. I took him in. He squeezed his eyes tightly, chasing away a life of painful memories, squeezing into being a dreamed reality. His arms wrapped around my back, needful vines around a maple trunk. He dropped all pretenses and squeezed me with his entire strength. And with the strength of his father who wasn’t strong enough. The strength of all the fathers who are strong enough. He hugged me with the force of the child he was. The strength of old desires, fantasies about him being there. The strength of emptiness, loneliness, rejection, and of the cold wind left in his bones across seasons. He gathered all of this power, supernaturally.
He squeezed the father in me. My maple ran out. My sap and water joined his sap and water. Flood of tears engulfed us, crested somewhere high in the heat above our embrace.
I swallowed his body in my arms and I Loved him. I Loved him with the Love of my father who raised me. With the Love of my father who never had me, then found me. I Loved that child with the Love of the fathers who weren’t Loved as boys the way they needed Love. And of the fathers well shaped as boys by father-Love. I was a surrogate Love, replacement parent… NO. His actual father. Who was I not to hold and Love this boy? In this moment, he was living a dream. Inside his dream, I was living a moment of endless dreams. Those of every child. And the sun poured down such light and warmth on us, and we were a young boy and a found man, holding each other, for dear life. For life is so dear. One embrace, to nurse generations of broken hearts. On that day, in that Holy moment, I was blessed to be all that a man can ever be. There. THERE. For him. So he could hug, and be hugged by… his father.
A True Story.
Jaiya John
*Birthed on May 14, 2013.
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Tears falling. This was something beyond beautiful....the word is not big enough. You're such a good man. 🫂
Beautiful🥺