The Titanic, Rockets, and Happy Endings
When I was a kid I wasn't allowed to watch the Titanic movie.
It wasn't because of the love story or the painting scene, it was because my mom knew that after watching it I would have cried for days. As a child I could never get over the fact that they didn't put more people in those lifeboats, and even 75+ years after it happened I still felt the pain as if it had just occurred yesterday and those people on the ship were my family.
It was the same thing with the Holocaust museum, the evening news, and movies without happy endings. As a child all the way into being an adult, I felt the pain of others' sorrow with my entire being. I was sheltered because the depth of the sadness would have overwhelmed my tiny soul and I simply could not handle it.
As an adult I am able to handle things much better, but I suppose old habits die hard because the other day this happened:
It was just a normal night at the Agan household and I was watching a tv show called The 100 with my husband. It is a completely unrealistic show about the last of humanity who lives in a space station and sends some kids down to earth to see if it is safe to live in again. Complete fiction. But in this episode the kids were trying to send up these rockets to let the space station know it was safe before the station killed off 300 people (they were running out of oxygen). I knew, I just knew, that those rockets weren't going to get there in time and those people were going to die unnecessarily.
So naturally I threw my head under the covers and begged Cameron to turn it off before the inevitable happened (because if you stop the television before the bad things then you can at least pretend there was a happy ending). Cameron tried to tell me repeatedly that neither the show nor the people were real and so it didn't matter, but I couldn't differentiate. To me this show was just a piece of real life, where real people die unnecessarily every day and I couldn't handle it.
So with my head under the covers and my hands pressed to my ears (yes I am a very weird adult) I began to be consumed by the sadness of our world, by the unneccesary deaths and the half-full lifeboats leaving the sinking ships. As I began to cry over a show about a fictional space station I thought about the one thing that could give me hope in a world of holocausts and terrorism and rockets that don't get there in time. . . . Jesus.
It sounds cheesy, but I am being serious that in that moment I could only focus on one thing for sure. . . that this isn't the end. In the light of Easter I was reminded that Jesus is going to return to make things right, to fix all that is bad and bring all that is good. And I thought about Easter being important because it means that the sadness doesn't have to last forever. One day all will be well because death could not conquer the light.
And this was the hope that made me come out from under the covers and breathe, knowing that everything will be ok. The pain of the world will end. And I believe that God will hold so tightly those who have been through unhappy endings as He reminds them that there is a happy ending after all.
It wasn't because of the love story or the painting scene, it was because my mom knew that after watching it I would have cried for days. As a child I could never get over the fact that they didn't put more people in those lifeboats, and even 75+ years after it happened I still felt the pain as if it had just occurred yesterday and those people on the ship were my family.
It was the same thing with the Holocaust museum, the evening news, and movies without happy endings. As a child all the way into being an adult, I felt the pain of others' sorrow with my entire being. I was sheltered because the depth of the sadness would have overwhelmed my tiny soul and I simply could not handle it.
As an adult I am able to handle things much better, but I suppose old habits die hard because the other day this happened:
It was just a normal night at the Agan household and I was watching a tv show called The 100 with my husband. It is a completely unrealistic show about the last of humanity who lives in a space station and sends some kids down to earth to see if it is safe to live in again. Complete fiction. But in this episode the kids were trying to send up these rockets to let the space station know it was safe before the station killed off 300 people (they were running out of oxygen). I knew, I just knew, that those rockets weren't going to get there in time and those people were going to die unnecessarily.
So naturally I threw my head under the covers and begged Cameron to turn it off before the inevitable happened (because if you stop the television before the bad things then you can at least pretend there was a happy ending). Cameron tried to tell me repeatedly that neither the show nor the people were real and so it didn't matter, but I couldn't differentiate. To me this show was just a piece of real life, where real people die unnecessarily every day and I couldn't handle it.
So with my head under the covers and my hands pressed to my ears (yes I am a very weird adult) I began to be consumed by the sadness of our world, by the unneccesary deaths and the half-full lifeboats leaving the sinking ships. As I began to cry over a show about a fictional space station I thought about the one thing that could give me hope in a world of holocausts and terrorism and rockets that don't get there in time. . . . Jesus.
It sounds cheesy, but I am being serious that in that moment I could only focus on one thing for sure. . . that this isn't the end. In the light of Easter I was reminded that Jesus is going to return to make things right, to fix all that is bad and bring all that is good. And I thought about Easter being important because it means that the sadness doesn't have to last forever. One day all will be well because death could not conquer the light.
And this was the hope that made me come out from under the covers and breathe, knowing that everything will be ok. The pain of the world will end. And I believe that God will hold so tightly those who have been through unhappy endings as He reminds them that there is a happy ending after all.
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