Don't Miss Her Heart

Shoulders sunk, sulking face, and heavy feet my daughter looked like she just got dealt the worst blow of her life. My six year old daughter came home from church this week with 1st grade drama. No farther than the church door she started unloading a story that was death for her. Absolute devastation. Supposedly her best friend that she spends every waking minute with at school and at church spent time with another girl. My daughter was lost and had no clue why her friend would want to be with anyone else besides her. Story after story. But have no fear; super fix everything dad is here! I was brilliant, pulling out all of the great Masters level education knowledge to solve this petty issue. I should probably take some of my daughters allowance it was so good. But it wasn’t working? How could this be, I am super therapist Bob that she so happens to have as a father.

No problem, I woke up the next day and started attacking the problem again. Once again it wasn’t working; my own stories growing up as a child and having similar issues didn’t make a bit of difference. Sitting in the bank parking lot perplexed as to why nothing is working it dawned on me. Not like a gentle feather, but like a concrete block pounding me on the side of the head. She needed to be heard, not talked to!

Husband, dad, son; spend too much time talking and you will miss a woman’s heart a million times over and over again. In chapter 8 of John and Stasi Eldredge’s book Captivating it talks about offering a man’s strength to our wives. I also imagine we have an opportunity to speak to our daughters in the same way. Check this out, it says “to experience the strength of a man is to have him speak on our behalf. For when men abuse with words, we are pierced”. My opinion is there is many ways to abuse with words.

One of those ways is to tear our wife and daughters down with our critical comments. Every critical comment that you make about their weight, how they dress, what they are acting like is like driving a dagger into their soul. I believe our critical comments have the ability to kill way before our wives experience a physical death. Why do I notice this? This is a tough one for a lot of men. The critical comments are as much about control as they are about noticing something.
Another way we can damage a woman with our words is to be a “fix it”. I love to fix it! If there is a spiritual gift of fixetness I have it. You know what though. I started taking tally of all of the great advice I offer my wife compared to the amount of times she acts on it, and it is not looking to good for me. I would say to every 1000 nuggets of wisdom she acts on 1. Wow! What I do notice is when I listen to her actively, meaning engaging her as she talks, she appears and seems more peaceful.

You guys any good at listening? How long can you hang in there before you start to shut down? In Proverbs 14:23 it says “in all toil there is profit, but mere talk lends to only poverty.” Sometimes our silence can mean as much as our words. When the cement block hit my head I realized that my daughter was hurt. I simply said to her “I bet this really hurt you having your best friend spend time with someone else.” Open up the flood gates dad, she burst with tears immediately! In all of my words and knowledge I completely missed her heart. She was hurt, wounded and scared. She wanted so much to be heard and listened to and I was all about the fixing. Well a couple minutes later the sobbing stopped and she simply said “thanks for helping”. She wanted her dad to pursue her heart, not with words but simply understanding.