The Language I Speak but Cannot Hear Spoken Back

A dear friend asked me today if I'd read The Five Love Languages. He was curious about mine. I haven't read the book, but the framework landed — the idea that we all speak love differently. Some through words. Some through gifts. Some through touch. Some through service. Some through presence itself.

The question stung because I realised something: I couldn't receive any of them.

Not one.

To a child love is spelt T.I.M.E. and presence. That's the language I've been speaking my whole life, even when I didn't have words for it. It's also the language I learned to stop asking for, learned to stop expecting, learned to stop needing — because needing it got me punished.

As a child I cried for time. Not dramatically, not manipulatively — just honestly. I needed the presence of someone who saw me, who chose me, who sat with me in my smallness. Crying for that need brought cold water over my head, caused me to swallow my tears, brought silence, and brought the message that my hunger for connection was an inconvenience.

But the wound wasn't just about time. It was about love itself — in every form, in every language. Words of affirmation? I learned those were lies meant to manipulate. Gifts? Strings attached. Touch? Unsafe. Service? Only if I could give it; receiving made me indebted and vulnerable. Presence? That's what I needed most, and that's what was withheld.

This is where the trap was set: I needed love desperately — all forms of it. But asking for it, accepting it, letting it touch me — all of it brought pain. So I learned the only logical response a wounded child can learn: I stopped needing it. Or I tried to. I vowed myself out of love altogether so that love couldn't be used against me anymore.

Except the need doesn't disappear. It just goes underground. And neither does the terror of receiving.

This is the double-bind made comprehensive: I was starving for affirmation, for presence, for someone to cherish me, for touch, for gifts that said "I was thinking of you" — but my nervous system had learned that accepting any of these was stepping back into the original wound. So I became incapable of receiving love in any language at all.

I learned a different language instead: acts of service. If I couldn't earn love by receiving it, perhaps I could earn safety by giving it. If I couldn't accept words of affirmation, perhaps I could become the kind of person who didn't need them — the useful one, the reliable one, the invisible one who asks for nothing and gives everything.

If I couldn't earn time through crying, perhaps I could earn it through usefulness. Through being helpful, reliable, invisible in the way that helps rather than hinders. It became my habitual way until it just became who I was. The one who serves. The one who gives. The one who makes time for everyone else's needs whilst her own became smaller and smaller, folded away like a letter written but never sent.

His question cracked something open: Quality time is the thing I've lacked most since as long as I can remember but judged unavailable and vowed not to need.

Because that's exactly it. Somewhere along the way, I didn't just learn to survive without quality time — I learned to renounce the entire category of being loved. I vowed myself into independence from it all. If I don't need it, it can't be taken from me. If I don't accept it, I can't be rejected for wanting it.

But here's the cruel bind: I'm still starving for what I've learned not to need. And when love finally comes — in any language, freely given, without conditions, without requiring anything from me in return — I can't receive it because the original wound is still active. The terror is still there. I'm caught between the desperate hunger and the learned inability to accept the very thing that would feed it.

The ministry of presence became one of my greatest gifts precisely because presence was what I hungered for most. But I've spent my whole life offering the world — my words of encouragement, my time, my faithfulness, my service — what I was terrified to accept for myself. I became fluent in giving what I couldn't receive.

There's a particular kind of blessing in having been one of twenty children welcomed into a home during those generous years in Napier, 1988. That season held a fatherly tenderness I didn't fully know I needed — the kind of love that wraps itself around a wounded young adult's life, patient and steady, even when she can't quite let it land.

I'm grateful for Oom Leon. Truly grateful for the steady presence, the kind attention, the way he saw me — the way he called me forth as a beloved royal daughter. He didn't make me earn his time through service. He spent time. He used words of affirmation that reached right into the orphan place and spoke directly to it: You are precious. You are seen. You matter. He gave gifts. He offered presence without asking for anything in return. He tried to love me in every language, and in every language, I couldn't let it land.

Yet I carry the weight of a late realisation: in my own woundedness, I never fully opened the door to let him fully in. There's a particular grief in that, the kind that surfaces only when it's too late to say the things left unsaid, to receive the things held back.

He was offering me the very love my soul has been starving for — affirmation, presence, time, generosity, tenderness — but in my woundedness, I couldn't fully receive it. This is the double-bind made flesh: he was giving me exactly what I needed most, in every language I speak, and I was incapable of accepting it. Not because I didn't want to. But because the wound that made me need him also made it impossible to receive him. I can see now how I was braced even as he was loving me. How part of me was already waiting for him to leave, for good things to end, for the guillotine to drop. My expectancy that good things don't last became a self-fulfilling prophecy of my own heart's closing.

Two days before I stood on the TENx stage in June, the inability to receive affirmation surfaced. My nervous system knew what was coming: I was about to step into visibility, into the gaze of others, into affirmation I couldn't let land. And then a month later, Oom Leon was gone. So I was already processing the inability to receive his words when he was taken from me.

Then my friend asked: How do you get quality time through work, when you appear to be so busy?

The question stung because he's right. I'm busy. Constantly in motion, constantly serving, constantly pouring myself into the needs of others. There's grace in that, real grace — but there's also a pattern. I've become so busy numbing the emptiness that I've made myself unavailable. Even to those who want to simply be with me. Even to the Father. Even to myself. The busyness is a kind of self-protection — if I'm always giving, I never have to risk asking. If I'm always serving, I never have to be vulnerable enough to receive. If I'm always in motion, I never have to stop and feel the terror of being loved.

Oom Leon's celebration — that threshold moment — it unlocked something. The tears came in waves, yes, but they weren't only sorrow. There was recognition too. His life, his love, the songs, the message spoke directly into what I'd been wrestling with, what surfaced in my prayer ministry work last week. The wound and the grace began to speak to one another.

You deliver acts of service, and Oom Leon spoke to you with words of affirmation, my friend said.

The ministry of presence is my most prevalent gift but I've become so busy delivering for others that I've forgotten how to receive. I've forgotten — or perhaps I've been afraid — to just be with someone. To sit. To be quiet. To let them love me whilst I do nothing but exist in that love. To let a word of affirmation actually touch my heart. To accept a gift without immediately calculating what I owe in return. To receive presence as a simple offering, not a transaction.

Oom Leon tried to teach me that. He tried to show me that I was worth his presence, his words, his time, his generosity — simply because I existed, not because of what I could do. He tried to call me into the knowing that a royal daughter doesn't have to earn her father's love in any language.

The realisation came too late for me to tell him: Yes. I hear you. I receive you. Thank you for seeing me.

But I'm beginning to see it now. Oom Leon taught me the rarest gift: love in every language. Two years of showing up, staying put, and walking with me through the rubble — speaking affirmation, offering presence, giving generously, serving faithfully. Most will never know his name, but his fingerprints are all over how I move through this world now.

He modelled what it means to let someone find their own way home, without rushing them. Without fixing them. Just being there. Just loving, in every language, without expecting anything in return.

That's the Gospel in breathing, beating form. That's what he gave.

He's still teaching others through me, through all of us he touched. His legacy isn't measured in applause — it's written in the lives he shaped, the people he made brave enough to believe they were worth love. In every language. Freely given.

I'm eternally grateful for Oom Leon. For showing me how to love like Jesus loves: with presence, with affirmation, with patience, with generosity, with a heart that never left.

I'm still sad, still teary in the tender places. That weight upon my chest — the one that settles when we're afraid to let people love us fully — it's lightened. Not gone, but lighter. There's recognition in the grief now. Understanding. The beginning of something like acceptance.

But perhaps it's not too late for the deeper work. Perhaps the Father is doing what he started. Perhaps He's teaching me what I've been afraid to believe: that I am loved not for my service, not for my usefulness, not for how much I give — but simply because I am His beloved, royal daughter. That His love is not conditional on my performance. That it comes in every language, freely, without strings.

That quality time with Him isn't something I have to earn through busyness or achievement or being indispensable. His words of affirmation aren't lies waiting to be used against me. His gifts aren't traps. His presence isn't punishment. His touch isn't unsafe.

It's something I can simply receive.

It's something I'm learning to receive. All of it. In every language.

The grief is real. The tears are real. In this small shift, I can feel it: the beginning of believing that I am worth being chosen, worth being sat with, worth being seen — not despite my need, but in the midst of it. That I am worth love, in every form, freely given.

This is the axe I'm laying to the root now. Not just the behaviour, but the belief underneath it. The old vow that says I won't need what I so desperately need. The orphan conviction that love — all of it, in every language — is dangerous and I must reject it entirely in order to stay safe.

I'm opening the door.

Slowly. Carefully. With Jesus standing in the threshold.

Perhaps the language I have spent my life speaking is finally becoming the language I'm learning to receive. Perhaps I'm learning to receive in all the languages I never knew how to ask for.

🕊️ Not earning presence.
🪨 Not renouncing need.
✍️ Not translating pain immediately into usefulness.
🌱 Simply allowing myself to be loved while doing absolutely nothing to deserve the moment.

I'm grateful for all the prayers as I continue to lay the axe to the root of my habitual ways of self-protection.