Love is patient and kind.
Love is patient and kind.
Hallelujah for a friend to remind me
that love is patient and kind.
—Lowland Hum, “In Flight”
My latest baking project was not going well—to put it mildly. The apricot hand pies that I had envisioned as a delicious midwinter delight were rapidly devolving into a disastrous debacle. If you know your fruits, you’ll know that, in the Northern Hemisphere, domestic apricots don’t grace the produce section until at least May, and any that show up in the middle of our winter are imported from the Southern Hemisphere. Somehow, I didn’t know that then, even though I worked for a fruits and vegetables newspaper. When I saw the $11-a-pound price tag on the Chilean apricots at my store, I nearly fainted—and found myself settling instead for plums. Which were hard. And I was baking the pies that evening. Oh well; they’d soften in the oven, right?
At this far remove, I can’t remember why I chose to make this particular confection at this time of year. It was a season in my life of culinary curiosity, certainly, and my kitchen skills were usually adequate to pull off any of the new recipes I decided to attempt. I’d just recently discovered hand pies and thought they’d make a cute treat. It’s also possible that there was someone I was trying to impress. It’s certain that I was feeling on edge and insecure about several things, even before my pastry started going south.
The recipe writer had described the dough as never-failing, with the caveat that it required “a bit of fussing,” with multiple chill periods advised. Maybe I missed a step somewhere, but I recall the dough being a sticky mess when I first mixed it together, and it hadn’t improved much by the time I started adding the filling to the innumerable pastry rounds. The filling itself was also proving a difficulty; the recipe had said to chop the fruit into “small bits,” but my pieces of hard plums were wonky-shaped and made odd lumps in the dough when I folded it over, sometimes even tearing holes through the top. Far from looking cute, the pies were a sad mess.
I’d started my project directly after dinner, but it was now considerably later in the evening, and I was growing increasingly frustrated. My dad, who was in the kitchen helping my mom with the dishes, made some innocuous comment—maybe “How much longer do you think you’ll be?” or maybe something else—and I lost it.
The tears that had been building up as my baking project got worse and worse finally overflowed. For a few moments I silently cried onto the misshapen pies, but then, realizing the dam was about to burst in earnest, I turned and went upstairs and shut myself in my room.
Fortunately, the door doesn’t have a lock. Several minutes later I heard a soft knock, and managed to gulp out “Come in.” My dad came in and sat down next to me on the bed, where I had been crying in the dark, and asked forgiveness for what he’d said earlier. “I-It wasn’t you,” I said, weeping harder than ever. And then I told him what was really on my mind.
The newspaper I worked for had recently acquired a new intern for the spring semester. She and I came from the same journalism program and I realized, after looking at her impressive resume, that our years at the school had likely overlapped. She had been a columnist and a copy editor (my current job title) and had done magazine work and had started her own successful blog and had written for other publications and . . . She was a good writer, there was no doubt of that. My writing skills were fine, but I was an indifferent reporter and inclined to give in to my introverted tendencies rather than chasing down a story. Moreover, this was the first intern we’d had who was actually younger than me (I graduated college when I was 20). As the weeks passed and I saw more of her abilities and confidence, I became convinced that my bosses would realize what an asset she could be to the company and would fire me and hire her instead.
The idea sounds ludicrous to me now, but in that moment, when I was still recovering from an autumn brain surgery and on an anti-seizure medication that caused anxiety and mood swings (something I didn’t learn until later), it seemed an all-too-real possibility. Somehow, I managed to relate the story to my dad between sobs.
My father is an intelligent, practical man who knows his way around business settings. He could’ve told me that companies don’t typically do things like that. He could’ve told me that I was a smart, capable woman with skills of my own that my bosses recognized and appreciated. But instead of giving me a pep talk, he simply said, “Oh, my daughter,” put his arms around me, and held me close while I cried myself out.
The memory of his kindness makes me cry even now.
The plum pies eventually got baked, and I think my friends or coworkers ate them, despite the pies’ haphazard appearance. The intern finished her semester with us and went on to another job at a different publication. I spent the next thirteen years at the newspaper, slowly climbing through the ranks through rounds of layoffs and reorganizations until somehow, by the time the pandemic years struck, it seemed I had made myself indispensable. Even though I loved my job, I’d also begun to feel burnt out—all of us had.
Our team was as small as it could possibly get and still function, with everyone juggling the roles that multiple other people used to fill. But the news never stopped, and, in our industry, the stories just seemed to get worse. Fifteen months of working from home had brought a certain amount of relaxation—who cared if I wore shorts all day? Or the same shorts five days in a row?—but it also brought ten- and twelve-hour working days. Though the weekend gave a respite, it was never enough to feel really rested. I thought and worried about work constantly. Then, in the summer of 2021, my closest teammate and friend called me and said that she’d handed in her two weeks’ notice in order to start her own business as a consultant. I was overjoyed for her and did not blame her one bit for quitting—she worked even harder, longer days than I did—but at the same time I felt the floor drop out from under me. What was I going to do now?
At that moment, there came a knock at my door and my dad dropped in to deliver my mail. “Ashley just quit,” I told him . . . and promptly dissolved into tears. Just as he had done so many years before, he quietly sat down next to me, pulled me close, and whispered “Oh, my daughter,” as I sobbed into his shoulder.
The Hebrew word hesed, which denotes God’s covenant love toward His people, occurs around 250 times in the Old Testament. English doesn’t have a direct correlation to its deep, profound meaning, so it’s translated a variety of ways. I’m inclined to favor the English Standard Version’s choice of “steadfast love,” as the image it brings to mind of an immovable granite rock is particularly reassuring to one of my emotional variability. I find it appropriate, however, that my dad’s favorite is the New American Standard Bible, which translates hesed as “lovingkindness”; he appreciates how it captures God’s heart of tender compassion.
For a long time, I didn’t really understand what the Bible meant when it talked about the kindness of God. I believed He was kind, of course, but the idea was still somewhat abstract. What does it look like for the Creator of the universe to be kind? Now, however, a whole bank of images springs to mind—the Father clothing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Jesus scribbling in the dust while the Pharisees gibber at the woman caught in adultery; the gentle way He greeted Mary at the tomb on Easter morning. But perhaps the strongest image is that of a Father with His arms wrapped around a weeping child, tenderly whispering “Oh, My daughter,” as He holds her tight.
After all, I can still feel those arms.
The featured image is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Amelia M. Freidline lives in the Kansas City suburbs with her parents and a feisty wee terrier named for the tallest mountain in Scotland. She studied journalism, English, and history at the University of Kansas and has worked as a word herder and comma wrangler in food media throughout her professional career. She’s a founding member of The Poetry Pub and has helped edit poetry collections for Bandersnatch Books. She is an amateur poet and writer, a photographer of faeryland, and a wielder of butter, and has self-published several small collections of original writing and photography. Raised on Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, Sayers, Conan Doyle and Wodehouse, Amelia hopes to be British if she grows up. She enjoys trees, adventures, marmalade, and great conversations. She loves Jesus because He loved her first.
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