The Great Unfixables

#68

Friend,

“The Great Unfixables.”

I was listening to a podcast by Ruth Haley Barton last week and she said, “Especially when you face The Great Unfixables in your life.” I don’t know what she said next as I got to thinking about that phrase.

The Great Unfixables.

We all have those things, don’t we? You have those things that you just can’t fix. You can’t undo or redo. You can’t make another person do something. You can’t change somethings about yourself. Ignoring the diagnosis doesn’t make it disappear.

There are a lot of things in life that we have some agency with and influence on. We may not be able to do much fast, but we can at least do something. But that is not what The Great Unfixables are.

The Great Unfixables are truly the places in our life that we can not change. And I know it is not for lack of effort. You’ve tried to change it. You’ve tried to change them. You’ve tried and tried and tried. But the nature of the Great Unfixable is simply that it cannot be fixed, but it can be lived with.

The only way forward with The Great Unfixables is to live in the tension of acceptance and hope.

With acceptance, we understand that this is our actual life, and we have these things that we cannot fix. The best we can often do is to learn from them as we limp forward with others. The key to having hope in The Great Unfixables is to walk with others who will share the burden of them with you.

When you open your Great Unfixables to someone who will bear it with you (not fix for it!), then you will be able to see and feel that while it is “great,” it is not “consuming.” That person will often reveal to you their great unfixable, and then you get to live in the reality of true friendship.

What is true friendship?

I love this quote from C.S. Lewis, “Friendship begins at the moment that one person says to another, “What, you too, I thought I was the only one?”

In this true friendship, you can realize that you are not problems to be fixed, but people to be loved, and isn’t that one of the most beautiful things in life?

Love,

Aaron