beautiful and real

Sometimes life makes perfect sense.  Your best friend visits from Chicago.  A baby is born healthy and happy.  Two friends get married on a perfect summer evening.  You stay up late talking about life and faith around the fire with your friends and mentor. A beautiful little girl is adopted and brought home.  A one year anniversary.  Seventy-five degrees at 7:00pm.  A pumpkin muffin and chai latte at the bakery.  A baby kick so strong you can see your shirt moving.  Life is sweet here in these places that make sense, these places that make you a better person than you were before they happened.  But life can’t stay here.  It moves on to the realities we all live with—whether that is sickness or longing that there is no cure for yet, or money we just do not have, or a relationship that we once fought hard for and have now relegated to a category not worth fighting at all for. 

Life bounces between the walls of hope and apathy so quickly.  One moment can feel like all is well and the next like nothing will ever be the same.  Some seasons our lives feel like one long facebook status roll of highlights, and other seasons we feel like if that person posts one more picture or one more brag-status about her perfect life and perfect home and perfect baby I am de-friending her (not that I have ever, ever felt that way).  Some days we feel so, so good about the work we are doing and we wouldn’t want any other job in the world, and other days we feel like—no matter what the work is—there are no children being freed from slavery and in that case, it is not nearly noble enough to give your heart to.

We are up then down, left then right, confident then lonely, secure then anxious, sometimes all in the same day.  This is life, and the beauty is not always in what is perfect or makes sense; the beauty is in what is real and true and what faith sustains in you.  If your relationships are real, then even when they are hard, they are beautiful.  If your desire for healing or for answers is real, even if it is long-coming, it is beautiful, not to mention inspiring.  And if your faith sustains hope in your heart and the knowledge that your life is being orchestrated by a God who is able to keep us from falling, then it is beautiful. 

  

Real is simply beautiful.  Sometimes it means you are happy and other times it means you are broken, but it always means you’re authentic.  For me, the most life-giving people around me are the truth-tellers, the real ones.  The most deep and formative experiences have been ones I would not have chosen to go through, but they did their job in my life because they were real.  In a world full of false praise, dishonest critics, and let’s be honest, a whole lot of never-going-below-the-surface friendships, real is more needed than ever.  Being real is the only stabilizer in life’s tennis match of emotions and circumstances, and it is the only thing that allows us to truly leave our gifts with the world.

In the days that make sense or in the days that leave me without words, I want people around who will celebrate like crazy over the smallest things, and who will cry an understanding tear when the news is bad.  And I want to be that person to others, because I have found that even in the worst times, when I’m around the truth-tellers, things always make a little more sense. 

Beauty is honest, and the world needs more of it.  We don’t need one more person trying to be someone they are clearly not, or portray a life that doesn’t exist.  We just need more of what is real, because that is what is really, really sweet about life.