Presence Is Enough
Psalm 147:3
“He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”
The house was dark.
Another one of those middle-of-the-night hours where everything feels heavier than it does in the daylight.
We had been awake for hours with a false alarm potty mishap and a now wide-awake three-year-old. It had already been a more challenging day and on top of that, a migraine had been slowly building behind my eyes.
My daughter sat beside me eating crackers while I tried to pull myself together.
Toddlers don’t understand migraines.
Or exhaustion.
Or the complicated weight that sometimes settles in adult hearts.
But they do notice when their mom is crying.
I usually try to hold it together when my kids are around. Not because emotions are bad, but because I I never want them to feel responsible for them. But that night the tears came anyway.
She looked at me for a moment. Not confused or upset. Just watching. Then she put her plate down, slid a little closer, and laid her head down on my lap.
My kids
No questions.
No attempt to fix anything.
Just closeness.
For a moment my mind started racing the way it sometimes does.
Is this okay?
Am I teaching her to carry emotions that aren’t hers?
Am I making her worry about me?
But the longer she sat there, the more I realized something important.
She wasn’t trying to fix me.
She wasn’t trying to solve anything.
She was simply sitting beside someone she loved.
And maybe that’s what empathy looks like in its simplest form. Not solving. Not carrying. Not taking responsibility for someone else’s feelings.
Just staying close.
Children have a way of responding to emotion without overcomplicating it the way adults do. They don’t analyze every interaction. They don’t search for hidden meanings.
They simply move toward connection.
And sitting there in the quiet, I couldn’t help but notice that this is actually closer to the way God meets us too.
Not always fixing everything immediately or removing the hard moment.
But staying near.
Sometimes I imagine that nearness looking like that moment in the dark —
a tired mom, a small child resting close, and the quiet reminder that presence is enough.
