Crucial

There’s something that I’ve been itching to write about for weeks now, but I haven’t done so at the risk of exposing too much of myself emotionally. If you know me personally, you’d know that I take pride in my lack of sentiment. I don’t cry, I don’t say “aww,” I’m not a romantic, I hate chick flicks, etc etc. The truth is, I actually like chick flicks. Ha, yeah right. But I do have feelings, I just don’t wear them on my sleeve. And of those feelings, the one that seems to be most prevalent these days (for myself and many) is pain.

We’ve all gone through pain; whether it be in the form of loneliness, loss, disappointment, frustration, or even hopelessness. The conclusion that I’ve come to over the past few weeks is that pain is good. No, I’m not a masochist; think more of the St. Paul version: “rejoice in our sufferings.” But let’s not dwell on something that the Bible already tells us (see Romans 5 for elaboration). What I’m talking about is what happens when we pull a Samantha, a.k.a. denying our feelings. We can’t get rid of pain by pretending that we don’t feel it. And we can’t deal with pain by pretending like it doesn’t hurt.

I was on a plane the other day, alone and exhausted, when I reached for one of my sources of never-failing comfort: my iPod. One of my favorite best-kept secrets is a hip-hop artist by the name of K-os. He’s probably the only good thing to come out of Canada (no offense to all the Canadians reading this; since there are so many Canadians who read my blog). K-os has a song called Crucial off of his album Joyful Rebellion. Even though the song is about a girl (side note: I have a personal theory that all the songs out there about girls or guys were actually written about Jesus, but in order to reach the masses, the lyrics were edited to be secular instead of religious. This theory doesn’t work all the time, but I’m sure you can think of a few examples), I found the chorus to hit home on this whole idea of responding to pain. The lyrics are as follows:
I don’t wanna change the world
I only wanna stop pretending

I don’t want to pretend that pain doesn’t exist, and I don’t want to pretend that it doesn’t hurt. Pain sucks. But you know what? The best things come from pain. How many analogies have we heard of great things coming from crappy things? The butterfly from the cocoon, the flower from the dirt, the two-story Forever 21 from that lame furniture store in Fair Oaks. Instead of trying to rid my life of pain, of sorrow, or of suffering, I’m going to embrace it. And you know what else? I’m going to smile in the process. So the next time you see me and I’m joking around or doing the Running Man during P&W, don’t think I don’t know what pain is. If anything, know that I’m going through the most painful time in my life to date…and be happy for me. Because I’m almost there