My earliest memory of Easter has nothing to do with chocolate bunnies or pastel church dresses with flowers and frills. It is about being lost. While the details are as fuzzy as a newly hatched chick, I was at an Easter egg hunt when I realized that although countless people surrounded me, I was utterly alone. I didn’t recognize anyone.
Not yet a master of catastrophizing, I wasn’t worried about being stolen or living on the streets with other vagrant preschoolers. Instead, I felt completely paralyzed – frozen in a moment of desolation that knew no spring.
While that was my earliest memory of feeling lost, there have been many others. Each time, I remember feeling as rotten as that one egg that no one at an egg hunt can find until its stench is so strong that you begin wondering if maybe there’s a dead body lying somewhere behind the azaleas. Only, I’m the dead body. Or, in this case, the smelly egg.
Of course, we all want to focus on our great dye jobs or the flawless shell that hides these moments of desolation. But eventually, most of us encounter seasons or circumstances that can make life feel like a daily penance. The atonement of broken promises, strained relationships, disease, and death can feel both unfair and unbearable. Without faith, and sometimes even with it, it’s easy to feel lost.
The world moves fast, often without regard to who or what gets destroyed on its tornado-like path. Despite constant digital communications, meaningful relationships feel rare, and although we see an infinite number of images daily, most of us still feel unseen. It seems like even the savviest navigator could get lost in a world such as this. Read more
We all have a story and often we are afraid to tell it. It’s the part of us that doesn’t come up in our social media feeds or in casual conversation. I get that. I don’t tell all of mine. All any of us can do is share what we are comfortable with and hope whoever we trust doesn’t use it to cause pain. Most of us have already experienced enough of that.
I was doing my teenage Uber driving duties and thinking about the advice that encourages parents to talk to children in the car. After all, they are a captive audience, don’t have to make eye contact (because God forbid, we have any of that), and both parent and child are physically restrained –that might not have been among the reasons listed but it does seem worth noting. We were on the return portion of our journey into silence and I was lamenting the misery of it when I looked out the car window and saw a man sitting on a bus stop talking to himself. Our eyes met and for a moment he silenced.
The last day of vacation I woke up with a tingling feeling on my lips. When I looked in the mirror, even through the blur of twilight I could tell they were noticeably fuller — like the fairy godmother of plastic surgery had visited in the night. I checked different body parts to see if she had generously waved her wand in other places too. Sadly, it was just my lips.