I couldn’t have painted a better scene of missionary life. Small, native children ran alongside, urging me to take their picture. Scraggly dogs yapped in rhythm. The air was heavy with rain, the smells rich and primordial. We walked a tree-lined road that was overgrown yet stately. As we walked, the pastor of the local church was explaining the move of God’s Spirit in his country.
Then he unconsciously broke the marvelous mood. As a show of affection, this African pastor took my hand and firmly held it as we walked. The action took me by surprise. Every nerve in my arm screamed to my head, “Pull away. Fast!”
I looked around to see if anyone could see us-two men holding hands on their way to the next village. I hoped my sweaty palm would make further hand holding impossible, but the pastor ignored the squishiness and retained his warm grasp. In my discomfort, I learned something about myself: I am a child of my culture.
Even though all of us are learning to break through “macho” stereotypes, which prevent many men from showing much affection at all, on that African path I forgot all notions of the liberation of the changing modern male. As the seconds collided together, I planned my escape.
“Look at that!” I said, pointing my sweaty hand at a child holding a scorpion by the tail. It happened to be the hundredth one we had passed in the last mile, but it gave me an opportunity to slip my hand out of his and firmly embed it in my pocket for the rest of the trip.
I was safe from my hangups for that day, yet the incident began a trail of thought that I would walk many times. Why had I reacted with such alarm? Why is intimacy such a dark closet in my mind, while others have acquired such holy freedom to express emotions outwardly?
Several years have passed, and I have tried to answer those questions in the context of my own ministry. As a pastor, I have also noticed the dilemma as perceived by men and women in my congregation: To hug or not to hug? It’s a haunted house with many rooms and few guides.
A Time to Refrain from Embracing
I notice a secular world fidgeting more and more at the idea of being close to others. Back in 1984, Ms. magazine was calling intimacy a “turn-on,” and Harpers was warning society of “Enemies to Intimacy.” But since affection and sexual attraction are rarely divorced in the secular mindset, sexually transmitted diseases are closing the door to intimacy, public or private. Now the world feels it will survive only if it shows the cold shoulder. And by its definition of intimacy, perhaps rightly.
However, the fidgeting is not restricted to singles bars. It’s also found behind the pastor’s desk. I can recall a half-dozen tragedies that involved pastoral colleagues’ being removed from ministry for adultery. Each one of those moral failures steels my resolve to avoid the situations that wreaked such havoc.
But what is improper affection? And how do I avoid it? I’ve encountered several situations where I’ve decided strictly to avoid any show of affection.
When my emotions are unstable. Affection is proper under certain emotional conditions, but when I am emotionally unstable, a powder keg of problems is lit.
When my dad died close to my sixteenth birthday, I suffered an emotional letdown of mammoth proportions. I began to respond to dates in uncontrollable ways. The emotional strain was leaving me vulnerable to the dark side of affection: attachment without self-control. That, of course, was not good. I needed to still my raging emotional life before I subjected others to my misguided affections.
Several years ago in ministry, I came face to face with another potentially dangerous situation. A young woman came to me with a deep need to be released from alcoholism. We spent several sessions together, which resulted in both the alleviating of her drinking problem and her becoming a Christian.
During that same period, however, my wife and I were struggling through the stress-filled early weeks of having a new baby. We were getting very little sleep and were not as close as we should have been. One afternoon while preparing mentally for a session with the woman with the alcohol problem, I found myself floating into a sensuous daydream-involving her. I realized what was happening and invited a deaconess to join us for that session, which became the last.
I have no idea how close I was to the emotional precipice of infidelity, and I don’t want to know. I do know, however, that I was in no condition to show or receive any affection in relation to that counselee.
When the person pulls away. We’ve all seen the romance movies where the hero pulls the petulant damsel into his arms. She fights him at first but eventually succumbs to his charm, melting into his embrace.
A forced churchly affection, however, will never turn warm someone who doesn’t want it. At times, some people simply don’t want affection of any kind. It comes across as an unwanted commitment to an equally unwanted emotion. They need the security of distance. We’ve all known occasions when an overly familiar touch on the shoulder sends a shock wave of recoil.
When I sense a growing gap between myself and someone in the body, my immediate response is to attempt to bridge that gap with affection. I tried it last year, and I learned my lesson.
The elders had rebuked an older couple for an impropriety. During a particularly warm Communion service some weeks later, I sought to embrace them both during our time of greeting one another, but they decidedly pulled away from me. The wife summed up their feeling: “Pastor, we are no longer that close to you. Hugging us will not solve the problem.”
I realized I was using affection as a quick-fix substitute for the gradual rebuilding of a relationship. The one is not interchangeable with the other.
When it means nothing. A recent article in a well-known women’s publication bore the auspicious title, “Have You Hugged Your Dry Cleaner Today?” At various times in the secular world as well as in Christian circles, affection becomes the latest fad. The indiscriminate hugging of a dry cleaner points out that affection can be emptied of meaning through random and meaningless gestures.
But are there holy hugs that can be dispensed with integrity and surety of purpose? In the face of many emotional needs, let us not shrug off completely the ministry of touch.
A Time to Embrace
How do we know when to express affection in appropriate ways? Some situations lend themselves to brotherly shows of affection. Here are situations in which I’m willing to step out on a limb.
In the face of loss. I often think of the story I heard about a young boy and an old man. A family of three moved into a two-bedroom house. The boy, 5 years old, loved to play outside because his new house was too small. Across the lane lived an old man and woman whom he loved to visit.
The old man and the boy talked and played together every day. One day, however, the old woman died. The old man would not be consoled, and his neighbors left him alone with his grief. The boy’s mother repeatedly warned him to stay away from the old man and under no circumstances to bother him.
However, children have insatiable curiosities, and the boy eventually crossed the lane to talk to his elderly friend. When the mother looked out the window, she saw the old man weeping uncontrollably. She urgently called her son home. As he came in the door, she scolded him. “What did you say to the old man to make him so sad?”
The boy lowered his head. “I didn’t say nothin’,” he stated. “I just climbed on his lap and helped him cry.”
I cannot hear that story without thinking of my friend Joe. Although he is a well-respected member of our church, at times he can be an enigma, for he is sometimes caustic, sometimes comical. He loves the Lord Jesus, and he loved his wife, Edie.
She died one night after a lengthy illness, and I fought with myself over what I should say to Joe. I hate sounding insincere with words of comfort, especially to a good man like Joe. The moment I came into the room, however, his posture helped me know what to do. He sat slumped in his chair and looked ten years older and six inches shorter than he was.
I walked over, helped him up, and embraced him for twenty minutes. He cried and then talked till late evening. It’s been over a year now, and every time we greet it’s with a warm embrace.
When someone is hurting, affection is much more than a warm fuzzy or a mild turn-on. Intimacy is the bonding of comfort, the balm of closeness, the first and greatest expression of understanding. There are very few who will misunderstand its intentions, and fewer still who will misappropriate its vulnerability.
Remember when all cameras were turned to a small-town school in 1986? The space shuttle had exploded, and a beloved teacher was dead. How would the school kids react? The television cameras revealed a disheveled group of kids holding one another, embracing each other’s hurt. In the face of loss, genuine affection is definitely needed.
Yet even the embrace of comfort is not automatic. God’s people need reassurance that intimacy is not an enemy. Unless people have been trained to do so, most will not react to sorrow with physical closeness. More likely, they will speak some awkward, ill-chosen words. As a pastor, I take responsibility for bridging the affection gap.
I recall a delicate situation where affection was helpful. The man of the house had been killed in a plane crash. Since there had been very poor communication in the house before his death, the family had very little they could say to one another. In the middle of a visit to their house, I decided to instruct them about affection.
I voiced their inner anxieties about putting their grief into words, and I suggested they skip the words and enter into the intimacy that heals. I started it all by raising the oldest son to his feet and hugging him. Almost immediately they began to embrace one another and share their mutual hurt.
I left at that point, but I heard later that the affection had opened the floodgate of speech. Today, the family is closer than ever.
In the face of discouragement. Our denomination requires that each candidate for pastoral ministry complete a stint as a parish intern. I arrived on the scene of my internship with excitement and plans. This would be where I would cut my pastoral wisdom teeth! However, my enthusiasm was no match for my inexperience. I had to deal with a string of ideas that never developed. That’s when God brought into my life a strange type of affection meted out by a beautiful human being.
His name is Bob. God gave me healthy injections of Bob just when I felt my spiritual reserves reaching empty. Bob would saunter over in my direction after a worship service and place his firm arm around my shoulder. Then he would grab someone and say to him, “Tell me something nice about my friend Mike.” As forty other people listened, I had something nice said about me. All the time, the ever-present arm of Bob lingered. I couldn’t have survived without those times of encouragement.
It’s tough to define discouragement accurately. A slumped shoulder, a shattered voice, or a war-worn smile may be the only clues of a friend’s discouragement. But we pastors know that discouragement can be a killer, draining the last vestiges of personal goals and dreams. Warm, bear-hug affection can cut through discouragement faster than anything else.
We have an exercise in prayer meeting that we call “the filling station.” If someone is discouraged, we invite him or her to stand in our circle. Then we all lay hands on that person and begin to pray in turn. We thank God for this person, for the person’s Christian life and testimony, for past, present, and future ministries. The prayers ask God to fill the person with encouragement, but one of the keys to the exercise is God’s working through the laying on of hands.
Jesus loved to touch those who labored under discouragement. Touch became the signature of his healing ministry. A woman whose body had been tormented twelve years with hemorrhaging reached out to touch her Healer. As he asked who had touched him, the woman fell at his feet in fear that she had violated some law.
People in churches today also hesitate to touch lest they break some law about showing their affection. I picture Jesus raising the woman to her feet and holding her hand gently as he speaks a word of comfort: “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”
Caroline, a woman I know, has suffered for years from kidney disease. She had undergone months of preparation for dialysis, and her kidneys were giving her immense pain. Yet insensitive people had chastised her for lack of faith. Just months after dialysis began, she was rushed to a nearby hospital for a kidney transplant. Her heart was full of hope and praise. The kidney was rejected by her body, however, and had to be removed.
I came to her bedside not knowing what to say. She lay there despondent and worn out. All my words of comfort sounded hollow. I asked if I could hold her hand. She took both my hands in hers and held on tight. Then I began to sing songs of worship to God.
I was singing on behalf of her wounded spirit. For two hours I sang like that. My hands were holding hers, my spirit responding to the low condition of her spirit. As I left, her eyes caught mine. “God touched me through your hands,” she quietly told me.
In the face of rejection. I read a newspaper advertisement that totally caught me off guard. They were advertising for people who could work as deodorant testers. Every morning the testers would be expected to put on a prescribed amount of deodorant, work up a sweat during a one-hour workout, and then report to the laboratory. A paid “sniffer” would bury his nose in their underarms to see if they-and the deodorant-passed the test.
I could never be a tester. I’m sure the sniffer would flunk me, and I couldn’t handle the rejection.
The pews are populated with burdened believers. Many Christians feel so frustrated and inadequate because of past sin, failure, and doubt. And to finish them off, there are always plenty of “spiritual sniffers” to let them know when they aren’t making the grade. Therefore, to avoid rejection, people retreat into a world of don’t-touch-me-because-it-hurts-too-much. They are afraid to be touched, and they won’t touch.
A good way to bring people out of this cocoon of rejection is to show them through affection the warmth of unconditional acceptance. God’s people, however, must be subtle and sincere with this kind of warmth. Few things are more distasteful than a Christian who goes around handing out affection insincerely. People instinctively know when they’re victims of a spiritual cheerleader.
Ted had two qualities that made him as popular as fungus. In conversations, he did all the talking. But people could have accepted that quality if the other weren’t so obvious. Ted weighed 360 pounds. He had tried every diet and was on the mailing list of every weight-loss clinic in the Western Hemisphere. Even an amateur psychologist could see that Ted was carrying around a ton of rejection, which he tried to hide with food and words.
I tried to show affection to Ted, but he wasn’t easy to get close to (no pun intended). He kept pushing me away.
One day he phoned me and he was frantic. I rushed over to his house to find him in a pool of water. His pipes were leaking, and he knew nothing about plumbing. He couldn’t afford a plumber. And to top it off, he was too big to get under the sink himself.
I’m no plumber’s apprentice, either. But I asked the Holy Spirit for some Noah-like advice and then rolled up my sleeves. I got the water turned off and the tap disconnected. Ted and I drove with the cracked faucet to a local plumbing supplies store, and we returned with a new faucet, which I paid for. A mere four hours later I had it installed, like a true professional.
At the end of this ordeal, I put my arm almost around Ted’s shoulders and said I was glad to be of some assistance. At that, Ted began to cry like a baby. He said, “No one has ever cared enough to put an arm around me.” We spent the next two hours in talking and healing, crying and hugging. That day, Ted gave his life over to the control of Jesus Christ.
When I saw Ted a month later, he had lost sixty pounds. My embraces became increasingly more effective as they covered more territory.
Perhaps one reason there are so many untouchables around us is that they’ve rarely been touched by an accepting hand. My spiritual plumbing exercise opened a door to Ted’s heart, which could then accept my heartfelt emotions. I’ve learned I must build a foundation of acceptance first, and then I can erect a structure of affection.
Affection Ambivalence
My closest friend shuffled nervously as we waited in the airport to say good-by. As college freshmen unsure of whether we would return to school the next year, we sensed this could be our final time together. Blaine was leaving for his home, and I would head home in a car later. The terminal was teeming with people, which made our final moments more hazardous. To hug or not to hug?-we both felt the awkwardness of the situation.
“Why do guys find it so hard to show friendship with a hug?” Blaine asked. I didn’t have an answer. All I could think of was the possibility of a thousand eyes focused on us. But as I looked around, I saw many people embracing as a token of a fond farewell. That emboldened us to do the same. We exchanged bear hugs!
Affection reacts to genuine love the same way forgiveness reacts to confession: it’s the suitable reaction. Still, I am cautious, wary of those times when I might be out of line with a warm embrace. But through my friends who have cared enough to hold me close, I am beginning to feel release from the bondage of remaining distant. In the face of my own insecurities, I’m learning to sort out the time to embrace from the time to refrain.
Michael E. Phillips is pastor of Lake Windermere Alliance Church, Invermere, British Columbia.
Leadership Winter 1988 p. 108-112
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
