No Nest

On circuses, safe people, and the thoughts we don't have to let stay.

Sometimes I feel like my life is a circus and everyone has a ticket for the show.

Things happen in our family that just aren’t happening to other people. And the truth is, a lot of them happen because we’ve positioned ourselves to say yes when the Lord asks us to step out in faith. So they don’t always make sense from the outside. They don’t fit inside the parameters of “normal” that keep people comfortable.

And okay let’s be real..sometimes the chaos is just me. I am type B and somehow nearly everyone in my life is type A. So my mishaps land as comedy. The running joke. The entertainment.

I’m usually pretty open about our life. But every now and then the circus feels like too much even for me and so I go quiet. I retreat. I pull it all in close and stop sharing with anyone.

If you’re walking through estrangement, you know this feeling in your bones.

It’s just too much to explain. It’s something most people can’t understand, so when you do manage to say it out loud, the shock on their face can make your pain feel like a spectacle. A storyline. Something to react to instead of someone to sit with.

So we retreat. We go quiet. We decide it’s safer to carry it alone.

But this week I was reminded of something I keep having to relearn: there is holy value in being seen. In sharing it all - not with everyone, but with the right ones.

I word-vomited my entire month to a friend.

I’d been holding so much of it close to my chest, trying to fake myself out - telling myself it wasn’t affecting me as much as it was. And then I hit a breaking point. And out it all came.

Before we hung up, she prayed for me. With me. And in the middle of that prayer she said something I had never heard before:

“Thoughts are like birds. We can’t keep them from flying around our heads but we can keep them from building a nest in our hair.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Photo by Vlad Ionita on Unsplash

Maybe you can’t stop the thoughts from circling - the what-ifs, the grief, the replaying of conversations you can’t go back and fix. They’re going to fly. That part isn’t yours to control. But you don’t have to give them a place to settle. You don’t have to let them move in and stay.

And she didn’t just leave it in that one prayer. All week, every time something new pushed me back toward the edge, I’d text her. And she’d fire back two words:

NO NEST.

That’s it. And every single time, it disarmed me. It made me smile. It pulled me off the deck of the sinking ship I was so sure I was standing on and reminded me- that thought doesn’t get to stay.

That’s the gift hiding inside letting your pain be witnessed: people pray for you, and sometimes you hear something you’ve never heard before. Something that grounds you. Now every time a thought tries to build its nest, I picture my friend praying over me and I shoo it off.

I know sharing is risky. I do.

Not every friend will pray for you. Not every friend is a safe place. I’m not telling you to hand your heart to everyone.

But here’s the other side of that risk: if you never share, you never give the safe ones a chance to show you who they are. You never let them hand you the thing God may have put in their heart for you - the new perspective, the prayer, the bird-and-nest line you didn’t know you needed.

Ask the Lord for wisdom about when to open up, and to whom. He is faithful to answer that.

But maybe… What if He already has a word for you, and He’s just waiting for you to be ready to receive it?

I don’t know. Just a thought.

I needed the reminder this week. Maybe you do too.

Standing with you between hope and heartbreak-Nicole