If I could read your resume, what would I find?

The resume I’m referring to is not the typical job-searching tool where the shining moments of your years of schooling, employment successes and extra-curricular experiences are documented for a random person to decide whether or not you fit the bill for the position they’re offering.  I’m asking about your ‘life resume’ … the diary of your life story?

Would I read about a childhood filled with laughter and love or one tainted with abuse, neglect, abandonment or divorce?

Would I discover a teenager whose life was brimming with friends, Friday night football games and yearbook memories or a lonely soul who found it difficult to connect with those around you; one who spent too many nights dreaming of what it would be like to ‘just fit in’?

If I turned the page and scrolled down to your young adult years, would your words tell the story of a twenty-something enjoying the new found freedom of adulthood and a barely tamed enthusiasm for the years about to unfold? Or would a season unravel before my eyes of aimless wandering, of searching for purpose, or worse … a tragic event you never saw coming that pushed you onto a path that would change the course of your life for too many years?

Under the section marked ‘Dreams’, would I scan through a list of check-marked hopes fulfilled or be caught off guard by dried tearstains on a blank page?

Would there be decisions you wish you could have a second chance to make? Would there be moments where choice was removed and someone else’s will was forced upon you? Would your life be littered with ‘if only’s’, or would you be one of those lucky few who made it through, barely scathed by life’s hurdles?

Almost a year ago, my best friend and I were having a conversation that took an unexpected turn; a turn that caused us to consider the impact life has had on the people we know. What was unveiled in that discussion was a question that wrote itself on my heart: If I could read your resume what would I find, and what would it tell me about who you are and why you are who you are today?

You see, as adults, I believe most of us have a tendency to look at the people around us—the ones whose resumes we haven’t been given access to—and assume that the life they’ve lived is what we like to imagine.  A life that hasn’t been scarred by brokenness or tragedy but instead filled with sweet memories, visions of sugar plums and a family life that played out like the Cleavers instead of one of our current reality TV families.

But, what I’ve discovered, more often than not, is that most people have lived through at least one soul-scarring event, if not multiple events; and these situations, whether an occurrence of choice or force, inherently change people, shape their perspectives and alter their ability to cope or adapt.

Consider this:

When you’re getting to know a new girlfriend, do you instantly discern the heartache of miscarriage or barrenness in her eyes as you announce your latest pregnancy or introduce her to your newborn baby? Or do you translate her lack of enthusiasm as disinterest or, even worse, rudeness?

Is it second nature for you to see past the standoffish body language of the man or woman who’s uncomfortable with a hug for a greeting, or even a touch from you on the shoulder, into their dreaded nights of sexual abuse at the hand of a parent or trusted family member? Or do you instead secretly judge them as incapable of “normal” affection or, worse yet, take their cue as a personal affront to your kindness?

Do you see the scars left from months of cutting on a young girl’s arm, or the frail frame of one with an eating disorder, and automatically categorize them as people who just can’t cope with life like the rest of us? Or do your thoughts wonder about the damage that’s taken place to the soul of this child that forces an outward manifestation?

When your spouse reacts in anger to something you said that wouldn’t ruffle you in the slightest, do you instantly push back thinking, “How dare you respond to me that way?” Or do you see through the anger into the crushed heart of a young boy whose father daily beat him to a pulp with his words, and now he merely reacts to a defensive trigger that was placed there long ago?

Or maybe even the issue that God revealed to my heart in the midst of this conversation with my friend:

My husband and I have both been previously married. Our past relationships ended under very different circumstances but left both sets of kids as products of divorce. My ex-husband abandoned our family, and I ended up with full custody of our kids. He has never been a part of their lives since he left, and I have never had to live the “normal” custody situation of a “typical” divorce.  My husband, on the other hand, got the “typical” custody arrangement of most fathers where mothers are intact and healthy … every other weekend and one weeknight visit per week.

We had been married just over two years last summer when God showed me an area in our marriage for which I had little compassion.  I was viewing my husband’s situation through the filter of my custody arrangement and not the most current addition to his life resume.

Did you notice that I tagged the custody and divorce situations as both normal and typical? Did that strike you as odd? Until that fateful conversation last year, those words were commonplace to me.  My epiphany came through the revealed knowledge that there is nothing normal or typical about divorce and/or child custody arrangements. As much as our society has accepted divorce, and kids as products of divorce, as customary and even expected, the emotional toll that is exacted on the spouses, and to an even greater degree on their children, is severe. I’ve never met a divorced person who stepped into their marriage with the hope or expectation that it would someday end. And no matter what anyone says, no divorce is amicable. It is heartache at its greatest because it’s the breaking of a covenant that’s supposed to be life-long.

On the flip side of that coin, I’ve also never met a parent who wished that they would one day face life with a “normal” wait time of twelve days before the kids they formerly spent every day with would finally be able to spend the night at their “second” home.  Yet, here’s a thought many people have on this: “Well, they chose to end their marriage. Isn’t that the price you pay when making a decision like that?” Let’s remember, while many marriages may fall into that category, not all do—mine didn’t.  And regardless if it does, I don’t believe Jesus looks at the non-custodial parent’s heart and says, “Oh well. You get what you deserve.” I believe He grieves even more because He knows the heartache that is now, what is yet to come and what may never become “normal”.

God, in His mercy, pierced my heart with a compassion I had never known or tried to understand. How could I not hurt for the heart of my husband who had stepped into the full-time role of Dad to Teighlor and Alec as naturally and whole-heartedly as he did with his biological children; yet is reminded daily of the girls we only have a couple hours one night per week and, overnight, two out of every fourteen days? Did I ever stop to think how I would feel if that was as often, or little, as I saw my own biological children? No. And I never had to because I was never placed in that situation myself.

On the contrary, I expected him to just adapt to his custody arrangement. I expected him not to miss his girls, not to yearn for them, because … well, isn’t that what’s supposed to eventually take place?  My heart had adapted to abandonment and divorce.  His heart had adapted to divorce, also.  Wouldn’t he eventually adapt to daily life without his girls?  I hadn’t even considered the fact that I had never lived his heartache. My heart was reminded of the fact that I am blessed beyond measure to be a full-time, home school mom.  How could I not empathize with him when I could admit that my heart ached for Teighlor and Alec when they were gone four, whole days at summer camp. What a blind hypocrite I was. But God, in His mercy, removed the veil from my eyes and showed me His heart, and Anthony’s heart, for what I ignorantly viewed as “normal” and “typical”.

I went home and, in tears, apologized to my husband for never putting myself in his shoes, for viewing his custody agreement as “normal” and for placing an expectation on his heart that never belonged there. We prayed together, and I asked God to remove my blinders; to change me so that compassion would naturally flow to my husband even though I would never fully understand a heartache I had never lived through myself.

Everyone has a life story, and most people will have at least one section of that resume that was heartbreaking or maybe even tragic enough to dramatically change who they were originally designed to be by our Father in Heaven.

Next time you engage someone in conversation and there’s an awkwardness to it; or you go to give someone a hug who shies away out of discomfort; or hear the anger in your spouse’s voice that you don’t understand; or see a woman emotionally distance herself from your pregnancy news; or catch a glimpse of the girl’s scarred arm; or see the clothes hang on another girl’s frame … pause and ask God for an outpouring of compassion for what you may not understand because you have never walked a mile in their shoes.

Each and every one of us has a life resume. Jesus came to free us from the bondage that yokes us to our past. I believe in freedom because I’ve lived through it myself. But, I also know that there are still pieces of me that are tied to past scars and locked to triggers I have yet to define.  Freedom is a process.  Until we all can say that we are free indeed, I want to always be aware of the life resumes that I don’t have access to, so that compassion, not judgment, will be evident to the heart of the one whose resume is still being rewritten by the love of Jesus Christ.

Babs Coppedge