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5 minutes of sadness
Meghan Lusk
Maghan attends the Mayan, and is pursuing an MFA in poetry and fiction from Queens University in North Carolina. This is an excerpt from a non-fiction manuscript with the working title, We Are, Before God, Uncensored. |
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As we embraced in front of the terminal at Heathrow, he held me for longer than I expected. Two days earlier he expressed that he no longer had any romantic feelings for me, and I was obliged to finally have some answer to our brief love affair. Fed up with his emotionally distancing himself, I thought I’d rather leave with a broken heart than uncertainty. He was my first everything, and while I hadn’t expected the story to end the way that it did, at that moment I had no regrets. I returned to Los Angeles thinking that reality was resolution enough for me to put away the past five months and start over again. Weeks later surprising sorrow hit.
God prepared me for the break that I didn’t see at first. He surrounded me with friends and family on whom I was previously hesitant to lean (I was always the leanee, never the leaner). But in my new-found humility, there was freedom to acknowledge the facts and to confront disappointment head-on. Only — I felt like I was healing in reverse. I was hurt, but I curtailed my pain with humor. I was joyful, but I curtailed my joy with analytics. And once I let the “why” slip in, I was sleepless and restless and inextricably vexed by the most inconvenient reality of pain.
I am not still by nature. Not on the inside, anyway. I find myself outwardly expressing the tranquility that I cannot feel. I stand and watch green parrots grazing in a garden, or spend the better part of a morning contemplating the foamy swirl on top of a latte. Pain is a catalyst of those emotions, cutting you off from the world because its nature is so individual — but so is its purpose.
I realized just how close grief is to rest and how necessary it is that we take the time to stop and examine our feelings and ourselves. After all, whether it is a relationship or death, the
grieving process is as unique as the person experiencing it. That’s why God finds it necessary not to shield us. We need those times of self-reflection to grow out of our spiritual and emotional comfort zones and to put on the renewed self that He calls into being. My anger and confusion weren’t directed toward my no-longer love, but toward the God who needs me to grow beyond the limits that I create. The pain of the break-up wasn’t about separation from the other, but about realizing my separation from complete trust in Him.
My mom — her own heart breaking over my broken heart — finally wrote me these words a few weeks after the event, when I couldn’t fall asleep for fear of reliving the past in my dreams: “I am putting you on notice. You have 5 minutes per day to think about your pain and that’s it. You get to pick the time of day that you do it, but that’s all you have — 5 minutes.” I decided to meet her challenge, and found that taking control of my sadness forced me to take responsibility for how I dealt with my grief. I learned that “why” is not the enemy of healing. The enemy of healing is the refusal to admit that if we could answer all of the “whys,” we would be God.
And I am not.
Exactly a month to the day that I stood in pieces before one who could not love me, I found God’s love sufficient enough to put away my “why.” On a plane ride to Guadalajara, I took my five minutes of sadness to thank God for the people who supported me through the healing process, for allowing the beautiful things to happen, and for giving me grace enough to learn from the hard things. I let go of the struggle, and in its place wisdom took root.
God gives us full rein of our sadness so that we can explore and reassess, not to punish us. There is no pain without purpose, whether we see the reasons immediately or not. Are you letting a past grievance hold you back by not facing it? Does the world see you, or does the world see what’s keeping you from living?
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