Beard Guy and the 4-Year-Old
I can still feel the fear in my body, heavy, like an anvil on my chest. But I can also feel the justice—the slick, emboldening of it. He deserved a piece of sharp glass on his lawn.
Around Kindergarten, while living in 1980’s suburban Minnesota, I had a neighbor with a big black beard, who during the summers, often wore a pair of tiny lycra shorts, striped knee socks, and mowed his lawn bare-chested, a gnarly mass of hair curling around his nipples.
And all the children in the neighborhood were terrified of him.
Today, I kind of feel sorry for the guy. He was a single, yuppie guy, surrounded on all sides by noisy little children, without boundaries, whose boomer parents let them run around the neighborhood unsupervised. We’d run across his perfectly manicured lawn, leaving little footprints of smashed grass in our wake. He’d come blasting out of his front door screaming at us to “get off the lawn!”. Sometimes, in retaliation, he’d shovel his doberman’s shit from his yard into ours.
We’d hear our parents complain about him and we’d take up their offense. He was an evil, evil man, I thought. How dare he treat innocent children that way.
One day, with a sense of keen 4-year-old moral superiority, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I wanted to impress my friend Jennifer with my sense of justice. The man, whose name I don’t remember, so I’ll call him “Beard Guy,” had just screamed at us after we’d made a quick shortcut across his yard.
After he disappeared back into his house, after you know, all the yelling, I picked up a piece of broken glass and hurled it into his front yard, hoping that someday he’d step on it and cut his foot open. Oh the vindication I felt at this vision.
But we didn’t get away with it. Instead, Beard Guy had been watching us from his basement window, anticipating something else he could yell at us for. He burst out of his house again, this time chasing Jennifer and I, yelling, “Hey! Come here right now! Come here!”
Obviously, I wasn’t coming anywhere near that dude. We ran into my house and shut the door while he banged on it and yelled some more. Clearly, yelling was one of his favorite single-dude hobbies. But it was a terrifying memory. I can still feel the fear in my body, heavy, like an anvil on my chest. But I can also feel the justice—the slick, emboldening of it. He deserved a piece of sharp glass on his lawn.
Since early November, four-year-year old me has been making more appearances with the re-emergence of my ten-year nemesis, Donald Trump. I have that same familiar feeling in my chest when I hear of his exploits in our government and well, with other governments around the world. But unlike, Beard Guy, Donald Trump has friends. Lots of them, unfortunately, and while I can’t exactly shut the door in their faces I can delete them on Facebook, unfollow, and yell back at them in the form of petty albeit truth-telling comments on their social media posts. I can march out of their houses in defiance of the red hats on their mantles and send them angry texts about repenting for partnering with evil. And yet, inside I feel 4-years-old again, just wanting to live in a safe country.
Right now, I’m taking a class with Abi Stomvoll called Reclaiming You, learning my triggers, where they come from, and how to regulate myself back to a sense of safety. What I’m still looking for, that I really didn’t have at 4-years-old, was to come back into a home that felt secure. A Dad whose lap I could climb into and feel safe. Adults who didn’t tell me I was overreacting and scolding me for doing what no one else was willing to do—fight back. I wanted to come back into a home where rage wasn’t met with rage but with softness and comfort—of knowing I was protected if I needed to be.
Many years ago, I saw a man being ministered to beside me. The Holy Spirit began telling the minister words of knowledge (1 Corinthians 12:8 in the Bible)—specific details about the man’s life that the minister could never have known. When he first began speaking, the minister said, “the Lord really loves you.” The man scoffed at first. “Everyone knows that God loves us. That’s not really what I need to hear.” He just wanted confirmation about all the important things God had called him to do. But afterward I said to him, “I actually think you did need to hear that. You needed to hear that more than all the other things they told you.”
So many of us are dying for validation and significance, believing that once we have power and authority and prestige—once we have a voice that people listen to, we’ll finally feel good about ourselves. Secure with who we are even when the rest of the world is spinning out of control. But the whole time there is a God, a Father, a Friend that is inviting us to crawl up into His lap and offer us the kind of safety we’ve all been longing for. Instead of being able to sit and open our hearts to the Divine, allowing Him to speak over our hearts His trustworthiness, we settle for a much weaker, watered down version—a false control over our world that will ultimately unravel.
An Invitation:
This week, ask yourself what age you feel as you watch current events unfold. Invite yourself to access that childlike feeling and ask Jesus (whether you believe in Him or not) to show you who He is and where He is in this moment of anxiety. Give yourself 5-10 minutes (or more, if you can sustain it) to process this.
Feel free to ask God about Himself. What are some thoughts or phrases you heard in your mind? Write them down.
Comment below what you experienced.