Soft on the Inside

Advertisements prey on the mind and heart alike. One such commercial got me thinking — one on road safety. It featured the delicate process of glassblowing that forms intricate pieces all moulded into the shapes of human organs.

The idea’s simple.

Have a road accident and those precious organs of ours will ‘shatter’ like glass... considering the fact that, at a cellular level, we’re full of water. Water smashing at force against tissue membranes is doing worlds of damage.

We’re all soft on the inside.

Beyond the physical, there’s the mental, emotional and spiritual also.

We’re easily bruised and battered at levels that aren’t visible — but that are felt.

For Others

Even when we try our hardest to engage safely and effectively with people we’ll fail at times. As we walk away we’ll say within ourselves, “Well, that didn’t go so well, did it?”

Perhaps the concern is what they’re thinking about us, but a lot of the time it’s because we don’t like treating people insensitively. Hurting people — especially because we don’t mean it — hurts us too. These are our thoughts for interrupted rapport.

We have many reminders that other people are soft on the inside, particularly those in our families.

For Ourselves

If others can hurt us, we’ve seen above how our hurt of others also hurts us. Many things turn us emotionally, as we think (or stew) over things — mind informing soul, affecting spirit.

Protecting ourselves is possibly as simple as being reminded of our innate softness — that we have every right to go easy with ourselves so far as the blame game’s concerned. Whilst many are not hard enough on themselves, the people likely to be reading this are likely to be partial to being too hard on themselves.

Only do we cast our minds back to the last time our hearts throbbed with the pain of rejection or neglect or abuse or betrayal — or even for no reason we could identify — and we know how soft we are on the inside.

For God

The light of God is revealing the truth to us all the time, if only we’ll discern it.

The tenuous balance that’s known to life is the balance that God’s instituted. We have no recourse to it without simply understanding that vulnerability is about life as life’s about vulnerability.

We’re reminded in all this that we’re soft on the inside. The Lord wants us to know this; to know our capacities and to work within the design for life — which is love.

The whole point of life is to appreciate that everything revolves around the standard of care, for all things by their nature are soft on the inside.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.

Graphic Credit: Spark Game Servers.