Hard + beautiful = this life. This is the equation that's been kicking around in my mind this week. Sometimes people project only the beautiful... especially in our shine-it-up, every-share social media world. And sometimes they feel quietly consumed with hard.
I thought about this as I read I Don't Want to Know, a post addressed to "moms of the internet" on the new mothering collaborative, Kindred Mom. (If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out- a site full of real, relevant articles by thoughtful moms.)
"I don’t want to know how awesome your life is," writes Noelle Rhodes. "I want to know that your two-year-old had a tantrum after you told her she couldn’t eat the cookie batter. I want to know that your children read for about 5 minutes before one of them jumped on the other one’s head and tried to blame the whole scandal on the dog. I want to know that your living room only looks that lovely when you are taking a picture for your Instagram."
Man, does that resonate. I'm glad she said it. The curated images we see of each other's lives are gorgeous, and we can often feel a scrappy shambles by comparison. S c r a p p y.
I live on glorious Crete, and you'll see my Instagram feed full of pretty images. This is on purpose: I capture and share glory as much as I can... part and parcel of the beauty-seeking life. By searching out beauty, holding it close, praying thanksgiving for it.... I seek to expand it in my messy heart.
But I'm with Noelle; we also so much need realness about the hard. We need it for friendship and truth and encouragement. We need it more than ever, as the media-saturated world skews our sense of what's normal. We have to hold both realities in our hands - the hard in one hand and the beautiful in the other. We all get them both in this life.
You know something about my hard. Acclimating everyone to life in a new country. Wrestling front-end loneliness. Grappling with health challenges. Caught bewildered in the headlights of an unanticipated parenting challenge that's constantly taking the wind out of everyone's sails. The past year's certainly been harder than I expected, harder and scrappier. I write in part to be real about this stuff... because soul-wrestle, nobly undertaken, is the most honest form of living I know.
I'll skip pictures of my house at its messiest and my kids at their fighting-est (although there could be plenty of those, if I'm honest). Instead I'll post a few shots of Crete - not the "hard" exactly but basic, real, un-dolled-up. A snapshot into the daily.
These moments of our lives, these scenes - in my place, in Noelle's, in yours - they're part of the fabric of glory. Even the part Noelle described (and I didn't show at my house, though I could have) of one kid jumping on another one's heads.
The glory's the invisible but realest real part of the equation. Hard + beautiful = this life (and glory). Amen
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