Given

I recently left the company I had been with for almost 11 years and saying 'goodbye' to clients I had known for most or all of those years was hard. Some I had a genuine affection for and knew it, but I only realised afterwards in hindsight, what effect my knowing others, had had on my life. This, in part, because they never openly shared their lives, not out of aloofness, but I think in order to make sure that I really cared in a sense: I think people want others to see through the necessary barriers they erect in what is often a harsh world. And they know - as we do - that only if somebody actually cares will they take the time and effort to overcome those barriers because they believe the journey will be worth it. It is just my opinion, but if we have even the smallest sense of our own worth, then when somebody affirms that worth by mounting a sustained attack to breach our walls in order to know us deeply on an intimate level, it reaffirms us and the value of the gift that we are to the world. Not valuable only and merely for who and what we are, but because we were given and because of the nature of the One who has given us. Nobody should be bought cheaply. I remember reading years ago part of a passage from a letter by Roy Croft that has now been quoted almost ad nauseum, but it still illustrates what a real gift of love it is to another to invest in getting to really know them:

I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can't help
Dimly seeing there
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.