The beauty of the middle

By Mia Pohlman

The past two years during graduate school, I've worked at a family-owned cafe in Kirksville, Missouri. My co-workers and the regular customers at this place have become another family to me. I am grateful for the way they've so completely received me and allowed me to reside in their hearts and lives, grateful for the way they took me in and allowed me to be one of their own.

Now that I'm moving from Kirksville, I'm faced with another goodbye to people whom I have come to love and have been deeply loved by.

Something I've learned is that goodbye will hurt, if the love has been real, true and deep. What the people at this restaurant taught me, though, is that loving deeply is always worth it, even if the goodbye is going to hurt. The ways in which we shape each other for the better when we allow people to matter to us is too important to not give all of ourselves, too important to not say "yes" to loving in ways only we can love. The joy is worth the grief.

My friend Katie recently reminded me of a quote from the movie "Hope Floats": "Beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it's what's in the middle that counts." I remarked that this is so bittersweet because we don't realize the middle part. The middle is the daily life; the middle is what we often refer to as "the grind"; the middle is the motions we go through to do our jobs and live our lives. It's in all of this that we build and deepen relationships, that we laugh and cry and fight and forgive with others that we love. And it all seems like just another day.

It's when we realize these days are coming to an end that we see the beauty of what previously seemed mundane, the extraordinariness of what seemed ordinary. I think this is one of the things that makes life so heartbreakingly beautiful.

In her essay "On Beauty and Being Just," Elaine Scarry writes that in the moment we don't realize time or an experience is passing and how good it is because realizing an experience would be reflecting on it, and to reflect means to look back. Reflecting, because it is focused on the past, takes us out of the experience of a moment in the present, thus causing the present-ness of that moment to cease. We cannot, she argues, simultaneously experience and realize/reflect.

This gives me comfort. My un-realization is not un-appreciation; it's me living my life, immersing myself in it. All things come to an end -- it's what makes us human, what makes us need God, who is infinite. If there wasn't an end leading to a new beginning in the seasons of our lives, there would be less of an opportunity to realize how much we love and are loved, less of an opportunity to pour out this love on others. There would be less realization of how we've grown.

Loving and being loved by the people at the cafe has helped me understand the joy and amazement Jesus must feel when someone welcomes him into their heart and lets him live there. Praise that with Jesus, there is no goodbye.