we are resilient

We are resilient aren’t we? Something tragic occurs in our life or one occurs in someone else’s and it touches—sort of washes into our life like the tide of a large and destructive wave. No matter how we wish to stop and watch the tide—we find there is always a bus to catch or a phone call to take. Life never stops for us—no matter how much we wish it would or how much it feels like it has. You tell someone that Henry, your close friend, died from cancer this week and their smile fades temporarily and then they ask what we are going to eat for lunch. We refuse to stop to truly break over some tragedy.
We are sort of like my free promotional mobile phone. I can’t even begin to tell how many times I have dropped my phone and it has broken into pieces and once I even nearly drowned it in a bowl of water. But no matter what, no matter how many times I am sure it has broken for good and how many times I wanted it to break so I could get a new one, I always pick up the pieces and find even if it doesn’t work for a little while—it survives. In a way it makes me happy to know that people do not break very easily. Otherwise, it would be a sad sight to see everyone I know carrying around the broken pieces of themselves. Occasionally I do meet a person with one of those small tattered brown bags filled with their broken pieces…and I thank God that our hearts aren’t like the paper ones strung up on Valentine’s Day. I am thankful that our hearts are just solid enough to break…just solid enough to survive.