Sunday, September 21, 2008

Fair

**We interrupt this regularly upbeat blog to bring you this downer of a post**

I couldn't sleep last night. After tossing and turning for about a half hour, I got up in a tired daze and went downstairs to watch some mindless TV, to which I almost immediately feel asleep. The reason for this? I watched a movie last night called Rendition. Staring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Meryl Streep, its the story of a man who's suspected of terrorism and kidnapped and tortured for information. He turns out to be innocent and there's a happy ending...well, not really at all actually if you really think about it. Of course, they play on the heart strings because his wife (Witherspoon) is 8 months pregnant and he has a 6 year old son. What that man endured in the movie is my biggest nightmare. It maybe wasn't the best movie ever and it certainly had an agenda, but it got me thinking.

Life isn't fair.

Life can be going along just fine and then bang...disaster. A car accident to which one loses their whole family or their own health. A disease. A natural disaster. A terrorist strike. A mortgage crisis. A troubled kid brings a gun to school and starts shooting. Food is tainted with any number of things and your baby dies from drinking formula or your grandmother dies of listeria. A child is kidnapped after their parent looks away for just a second. A rape. Job loss. Being bullied. A miscarriage. SIDS.

Oh, I lose my breath thinking of it sometimes. Its why I stopped watching the news. No matter how many precautions we take, bad things can happen. I live in a very safe country, where my human rights are protected. But doesn't mean my drinking water couldn't become contaminated and make my children sick or we could be hit by a drunk driver or one of us could get cancer or there could be a terrorist attack here or my husband could be injured (or even killed) at work. I can usually handle these realities and simply focus on living day to day and being thankful for what I've been blessed with, but sometimes it gets to me. For the first time last night, I even had second thoughts about my upcoming tropical vacation that I'm taking without the kids. What if we die in a plane crash? Can we really chance leaving my children? That's silly, of course...I could die here too...but in the dark of night when you're not thinking clearly due to tiredness...the thought feels pretty valid.

I have become very cynical in the last few years. I find it hard to get really excited about anything anymore. Usually, there's a thought in the back of my mind wondering how long it will last. I'm happy, but for how long? This is awesome, but will it last? This looks good, but what's the catch? Because you know, there usually is a catch. It drives my husband crazy. He calls me a pessimist. I prefer to think of myself as a realist.

I'm a Christian (a post-modern Christian actually *or should I say with bit of a post modern bent?*). I don't talk about my faith much on my blog because I've chosen to focus on weight loss here, but underlying everything that I write and think is my faith and belief in a God that sacrificed in order to have a relationship with me. That doesn't mean that I believe he will protect me from bad things, but instead that he will be with me when (not if) those bad things happen. And I suppose that belief helps me function day to day. It also reminds me not to hold on to things too tightly.

In the movie, this man was stripped down to nothing. Absolutely nothing. They took his clothes, along with it his dignity, and threw him in a small dark hole in the wall, leaving him to defecate on himself in between torture sessions. His $200,000 per year salary meant nothing. His marriage and family meant nothing. The fact that he coaches his son's soccer team - nothing. His torturer at one point asked him who would miss him when he was gone. He went on to suggest that his wife would eventually remarry and his son would call another man father. His life didn't matter. Cold, disturbing and even a ring of truth. Life will go on with or without us. But, our life does matter...of that I'm sure.

So what did I hope to accomplish with this post? I'm not sure. Life is delicate, yet I continue to hope. That's about all I have to say.

3 comments:

  1. I'm with you 100%. Doug calls me a pessimist too... but I agree, we are just realists. Most of the time anyway.

    This was well said my dear.

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  2. bad things happen to good people all of the time and it just plain sucks! now i want to see this movie because for some strange reason i like movies that are so creepy because they could be real.

    anyway, i wasn't sure of what a post modern christian meant (still not really sure) but your definition of your beliefs align with what i believe...so we have even more in common.

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  3. i also avoid the news. And movies that remind you how unfair life is. I know that, I live it.

    How does life go on without us yet still keep us "alive" after we are gone?

    The living, living.

    That's the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. How sad they will be, how less bright their light will shine because I stayed in bed and didn't share the parts of them that are in me, with the world.

    xo

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