Who’s Got Your Back?

Who’s got your back?  Anyone?  One of our biggest jobs in life is to nurture relationships with those we can support and with those who will support us.

It’s often not until you need someone that you realise how few of these people you have when you really need them, and yet, when your back’s against the wall, you may well find that someone comes out of the woodwork to make that difference you’re looking for.

It’s always surprising who’s around when life goes pear shaped.  Some you expect would be there or even might be there, are not there.  Others you don’t factor in as caring end up being there for you.  And then there’s the total stranger that becomes a key acquaintance and even a Godsend during that phase of crisis.

The main thing when the chips are down is how much we need others—not to reinforce to us how unfair the world is, but those who will just sit, who will just park their judgement, who will journey with us as a friend.

Friends always seem to know what we need, and when we encounter such a friend in a real personal crisis a friend like this teaches us, perhaps for the first time, the value in helping.

I find this is the number one goal in life: to find contentment in serving others, to know that there’s a great deal of value in caring, and in being saved by the love of others converts us to being that kind of saving influence in others’ lives.  Of course, we’re not ‘saviours’, because we don’t need to be, and we really cannot be.

We’re simply that help to people that they define is helpful at just the time they need it.

Who’s got your back?  And maybe reverse it around—whose back do you have?

The truly great thing about helping and serving others is that there’s always a need out there.  Never is there a time when everyone’s sweet.  And in having been helped ourselves, God gives us a sense for who might be dejected and forlorn.

It’s times of suffering that teach us how much we need each other.  They also show us how intrinsic this kind of compassion is.  It works for everyone touched by trauma and pain, and once you’ve been touched, you always connect with the downhearted.

Trauma and pain are conversion experiences if we don’t anesthetise ourselves.

Life will always get us down if we let it.  We must insulate ourselves as best we can from trauma, and it’s people and relating and humour and being real and vulnerable that does this.

When you’ve had your back protected, something in you wants desperately to have others’ backs. Caring is a blessed contagion.

Finally, as a good mentor of over 30 years pointed out, all of what I’ve discussed here is underpinned by our impetus, our motivation, our passion—of pursuing connection intentionally.  This connotes the will to break past barriers that would relegate these ideas as pipedreams.  We must convert the will to connect and be connected with the drive to act.

Photo by Thomas Fatin on Unsplash