“God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And
even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite, against our own will, comes wisdom to us by the awful
grace of God.” – Aeschylus
The beauty of this quote is not a result of word pairing,
but instead, of the earth shattering truth it speaks. So much of who we are, who we have become, is
because of the situations that we have endured, the people we have encountered,
the genes we have inherited. Suffering
and pain bring about the appreciation of peace and mercy. There has been this shift within our culture
to shy away from things that do not feel comforting, that bring about
displeasure. I say, no, don’t do
that. Lean into the misery, lean into
the grit, feel the dirt in your soul and learn from the season of suffering so
that when your flowers of glory and victory blooms you can appreciate all of
its beauty. It feels burdensome and
terrifying to endure such calamity, but a life lived only half experienced is
even more tragic. It is in your heart break that you feel everything so deeply
and it is in the recovery where you witness the shadows of your strength manifest
into will and power. The meaning of life
can be debated upon, as it has been since the inception of humanity
perhaps. Nonetheless, it does not negate
the fact that in life we learn or we do not learn enough, and even within those
two choices emerges experiences. Within the gracious moments of experience comes
as Aeschylus disdainfully explains a process of procuring wisdom. It is this wisdom that is worth the restless
nights, the awful flashbacks of what we did, the moments of recognizing the
emptiness within ourselves where we wish more compassion lied or where we
wished away caring too much. There is so much complexity to the spectrum of
humanity that it would be disappointing to not wallow in all that it has to
offer. Crawl into your darkness and find
the light that is hidden in the deepest corner of you. Against our own will comes wisdom to us by the
awful grace of God but a much needed experience for us to truly live
alive. We cannot have love without
disdain, we cannot have peace without warring, and we cannot have light without
darkness. How would we be able to
distinguish what we want without experiencing or witnessing what we do not? There is growth to be had in all that we live
through, all of it.
-Trinity
