The One Who Stands at Every Door: The Fierce Love of a Protector

There is a part in nearly every system who frightens people before they understand him. He is sharp-edged, quick to anger, slow to soften, first to suspect every new face at the door. Therapists have sometimes called him difficult. He has probably been called worse. But look closer, past the bristle, and you will find something almost unbearably tender standing guard behind it: a fierce, unrelenting love with no gentler way, yet, to say itself.

He did not choose to be hard. He was handed the hardest job in the whole house — standing at the door that danger once came through — and he took up that post with a devotion most people never earn from anyone. Every sharp word he has ever spoken to a well-meaning stranger was, underneath it, the same single sentence, spoken the only way he currently knows how to speak it: you will not hurt the ones I love.

He is not the enemy of your healing. He is one of its fiercest, most loyal allies — and when he is finally met with patience instead of fear, the very love that once looked like armor begins, slowly, to look like what it always was.

Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. — John 15:13 (NKJV)

Every long watch he has kept, he has kept for love. He has been laying himself down at that door for years — and he deserves, at last, to be thanked instead of feared.

Rest Here.