Friday, November 18, 2011

Company, Halt!

There's a scene in the movie, Raising Helen, that has impacted me beyond the normal "wow, that was cool."  Its power speaks through its subtlety.  Helen receives a phone call on her cell while dining with work friends.  The expression on her face reveals to the audience that something is wrong, but you don't know what.  The camera slowly zooms away from her face, and you begin to see that the hustle and bustle of the restaurant continues, but she remains frozen in pain.  You later learn that on the other line, someone has just informed her that her sister and brother-in-law were killed in an accident.

Life is like that, isn't it?  We experience some sort of pain, whether it be a loss, an illness, a failure, and it feels like our own world has completely halted to a stop (there's no rolling about it).  Yet when we look around, nothing about our own experience keeps anyone else from moving forward.  Losing Jesse's dad jolted us.  Our world isn't the same, yet everyone around us seems to continue on as before. 

The song, Someone Worth Dying For by Mikeschair was playing on the radio this morning, and it hit me.  We are not the only ones who have lost a father.  I am not the only one who feels like the world has stopped.  How many others out there feel like me?  I've been so caught up in my own grief and making sure that Jesse is okay that I've ceased to notice others who appear frozen in time.

This world is bigger than we'll ever know, yet God has given us the ability to recognize needs.  We're not a land of make-believe, and our pain and joys are real.  Maybe in order to get through grief, it also means to recognize you're not alone in it. 

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