It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. This morning’s trip to the market confirmed it all. I’d been in the States for the past three weeks, so I guess I’d missed the gradual change of seasons, making its reality both thrilling and abruptly stark. On the thrilling side, I found giant heads of green broccoli, one of the foods for which I’ve had the strongest cravings in recent months. I’m not sure how long they will last, but I’m pretty pumped, to say the least. On the stark end, the growing season for pineapple has sadly ended. The only ones sold, now, aren’t as sweet, imported from Brazil, and nearly $1 each! They’re breaking me, these South American fruit sharks. Imagine living in a place where you can’t buy whatever you want, whenever you want it. It’s a tough world.So, I got to thinking about broccoli, pineapple, and life. I think one of the myths of the enlightenment is that life can be all good, all the time. Maybe it wasn’t the enlightenment and I just made that up to sound smart. But really, I feel like I’ve grown up in a wonderful American dream bubble, protected from the harsh realities of life in a broken world. My life has always been really good. And when it wasn’t good, my dad could either fix it or I felt guilty for my feelings, assuming that I was somehow failing in allowing their persistence. There was always something to be done to escape the things about life that I didn’t like. When I didn’t like my food, I’d send it back. When I was cold, I’d turn on the heat or get another blanket. When I was hungry, I’d go to the fridge. When I had a headache, I’d pop two Advil. But when I hit college, I started seeing that some parts of life were just plain ugly and bad. People were mean and friends died while they were still young. After unimaginable suffering. Some things couldn’t be fixed. So I grew resentful and decided that life was just plain hard. No good, just bad. I was sad a lot. But recently I was reading over my notes from a sermon I heard by Rick Warren, last June. He said that pain and happiness are like railroad tracks; they never really separate. Life contains both, and you’ve gotta be able to experience both, simultaneously. This morning I thought of it, again, with the broccoli and pineapple.
I’m learning that I’m not a huge fan of change. I always know, in my head, that good things are probably waiting on the other side of the change, but I still deeply grieve that which I’m leaving behind. Sunday morning, as I said good-bye to my family, I felt nothing but heartache. Flying into Paraguay, though, I was happy to be back. Not just joyful in the spiritual sense, but genuinely happy. In Time Goes Away, Rosie Thomas asks, “How do we make the moments last? How can we get them to stay when everything passes and time goes away?” On my last trip to Iguazu Falls, I vowed to leave my camera at home on my next visit. Each time their grandeur overwhelmed me, I would busy myself trying to capture what could never be represented by a small, inanimate photograph. In so doing, I missed out. I think I do that with life, too. I exert a lot of mental energy trying to do the impossible: capture and memorialize my very favorite of life’s seasons, so that I can pull them out and relive them in the colder months to come. Besides missing out, I’m falsely assuming that the future will hold no beauty. No longer do I want to ask how to make the moments last. Instead, I’d like to be fully present in each of them, trusting that new pleasures will come to be lived in place of the ones that have past. I recently heard that the only place missionaries are truly happy is on airplanes, because they’re always looking ahead to the next thing. They can’t wait to come home, only to find that home isn’t everything their memories have created. The same is true, then, for their fields of service. I don’t want that to be true of me. I hope it doesn’t have to be true. In His famous sermon on the mount, Jesus encouraged tired crowds to trust God with tomorrow’s problems, because each day had enough trouble of its own. I wonder if we couldn’t apply the same principle to joy: Don’t worry about trying to bottle it all up, today, because tomorrow will have it’s own.
This evening I steamed my broccoli and it was delicious. I’ve probably never enjoyed broccoli so much in my entire life. Gracias a Dios.
