Clint Eastwood Films and Lessons Learned

I have cried very deeply three times that I can recall. You know the cry, it’s more like a choking sound really than a cry. It’s hard to breath, you can’t see because your eyes are overwhelmed with tears, and your nose begins to run like you have a very bad case of the common cold. If you wear glasses like I do, this also means you have either had to take them off or clean them after you gained your composure back. It’s just not the best look, or the best feeling. It leads to puffy eyes, often for me my throat is sore after,
and I am left exhausted...

Three times I can recall crying like this.

Twice in my car.

Once during a very lonely walk back to my dorm room in late march.

But there is something sweet about Bridges of Madison County (if you haven't seen it, go rent it),
something redeeming about a love that was better off with its potential unrealized.
sometimes love is sweetest when it's kept perfect in our dreams...

What does unrequited love teach us?
(besides the very obvious fact that maybe we should be better protectors of our hearts?)

That pain you feel when you realize you’re so deeply in love with someone who does not feel the same about you… well that pain forces us to recognize that we are not in control, but that our hearts are so protectively held by someone much wiser than our fickle selves. When we too rashly give ourselves to something that was not meant to be, a prince that was never meant to be our significant other, there is something greater that holds us when we fall apart.

There are other lessons we learn in the process as well… we learn to be strong. We learn to guard our hearts with a bit more gusto than before. To be a bit wiser about whose feet we lay our souls at. And we learn that not all great men are going to be OUR man.
Most importantly though, this form of love, teaches us just how large our hearts are, the lesson screams just how much love we have to give for some very lucky recipients.  For me this meant I could put myself more fully into the friends and family I had neglected while I held on to hopes that would not be realized in the immediate future. It meant I could sing again, I could sit down and write without every thought being on my loneliness. It meant that my floor of beautiful women could have more attention, my academics which I love could excel (I got my scholarship back!), and most importantly, my relationship with Christ could blossom. No, those deep feelings don't just run away, we just learn to channel them into the proper ventricles.

And I think often like the stages of grief, moving past those feelings of wanting someone who doesn't want you (maybe they broke up with you, maybe you broke up with them, maybe they were just never yours to begin with...) can be very hard. You deny, you get angry, you plot revenge, you may be bitter for a while, you may pretend the situation never happened, whatever it is though, eventually you have to deal with it head on. Face to face, eventually that person, that situation, it comes back to us.
Well, I think there is a joy in that. There is a deep joy in facing down our demons. There is a pretty beautiful realization when one day you wake up and that Sara Evans song actually does correctly describe your life...

So, you "brush your teeth anyway" and you get ready, and you go to work or in my case classes, and before you know it, you're no longer bitter, you're no longer upset at the way things ended or the way they turned out, you're just okay. You're better than okay, you're great. And you just wanna thank whoever is up there, just gotta thank God for knowing that whatever was back there in your past... whelp, it just wasn't right. And maybe the next one won't be right either. Maybe the letters you're sending, or the texts, or the long conversations you're having won't mean a thing... but if that's the case, then you'll learn from that one too. And someday, when you least expect it... life just works out.
And that my friends, being content in that, now that is joy.