You know this time we live in is a funny one isn't it. We have the internet and social media and most of us know way more wonderful people than we actually have time for. We have contact with more beautiful people that we can actually know. I'm talking about the real kind of knowing here, the kind where you know what's breaking their soul and what's saving them right now. The kind where you know where they are finding abundance and if they are feeling beloved or broken.
And I can't stop thinking about this of late. It may be because I find, (a change from the twenties to the thirties) is it so often seems all one or the other. On one hand, we see so many hard things are happening. People have struggles, fiscal, relational, with health and the stakes are high. On the other, we can sometimes only see someone who knows all the right answers and does all the right things, has healthy kids and lots of help.
We can forget, with our vision filtered through casual encounters, through instagram and through those sometimes irritating facebook updates and comments. We can forget that everyone goes through hard things. We can forget that no one has their shit together. We can forget that everyone has good too, mixed with their hard.
Even here where I try to keep things balanced I wrote about rocking my baby under the stars but I didn't write about holding her down for a medical procedure while she screamed for help at such intensity that she popped blood vessels in her eyes and all over her face. Some things are just too hard, too raw, too painful that they don't belong to anyone other than me and maybe my most beloved, at least right away.
In the same way that some things are too good, too cherished, too abundant for words. I have yet to write about fifteen years of marriage and as my kids get older I hold most of their stories for just between us.
We can lose our places to be real, because part of our life is too out there and not meant to be shared that way. We can lose our places to be whole, because so much of what we see is just a piece of a whole.
We can forget that crucial piece to wholeness. We need to love each other well and we need to be loved well. We need love to get through the hard and to celebrate the joy.
It's through this love we can know others and be known. It's through love that some sense of wholeness starts to shift into place.
So I wrote myself a reminder. Life is hard and abundant. We have broken parts yet we are beloved. We need to love and we need to let ourselves be loved.