The Movie Theater

I SAT ON MY FRIEND ELLIE’S PORCH last week, and right in the middle of the table was a bowl of green snap beans. Every now and again she would grab one and eat it raw. I sifted through my memory folders, and not once do I recall anyone in my family eating a raw snap bean as we were snapping. What a misstep on our part, apparently.

I blinked back to that memory of my childhood, that day when my little legs were crisscrossed on the cool cement, and I wondered why it had been so long since I felt that feeling. It zipped across my memory while I sat on Ellie’s back porch, and my childhood was so close for a split second. There is something to those moments, something that is worth paying attention to and holding close. When we feel those moments, what are we meant to do with them or remember from them?

If you have eyes for providence, you will always see it. If you look for God’s movement in your daily life, you will see Him. And I just keep finding that when moments like the one I had on Ellie’s back porch lasso some long dropped-off memory, I need to pay attention.

One of the kindest things I’ve done for myself in the last decade is learn to pay attention to myself without judgment. When memories like that come to the front of my brain, I notice. They matter. They aren’t something to be squashed or ignored. And as soon as that Ebenezer Road front porch memory ran through my mind and changed my heart and affected my stomach, I realized I felt the loss of it.

We may not have the words, or the exact knowledge of what those moments bring up, but we know something feels off. Even though we haven’t been to Eden as it once was, even though we still have fun in our average day, even though most of us could say our day has gone well and the weekend is coming and we just found a great recipe to make on Sunday night, we feel the loss. And we think, I just need more fun, I haven’t done enough fun stuff lately. So we start planning the next place we want to go. Or we don’t, because we don’t think of fun or plan for it or consider it something worth our time. We feel the loss and assume the feeling of emptiness it brings is a companion for life on Earth.

I HAD TO QUIT something I loved last year. I am still grieving it deeply, but the morning I made the final decision and the full day after, I was a weepy mess. Out of nowhere, my friend Heather texted me and asked if I had any free time the next day because she was available between ten and two while her daughters were in school. That next day was my Sabbath, my day off for the week, and I usually do not do any technology those days. But I needed to escape. I just had to get out of my life and my head. I checked the movie theater app, and the Downton Abbey movie was playing at 11:00 a.m.

I could not think of a more fun lunchtime hang than getting to escape with Heather and a box of Sno-Caps to the world of Downton Abbey, where the biggest problem is whether they’d be ready for a visit from the royals.

I put on a pair of yoga pants and a massive fleece even though it was still summer and was incredibly hot outside. But theaters are always cold, and I love going to the movies so much that I have to be comfortable. We sat in our assigned seats, and I turned my phone off. Not on silent—all the way off. I had to escape from all of it: the angry internet and the texts from friends. They were almost all supportive, so it wasn’t that they were bad; they just made me sad. I needed to escape from all that my phone connected me to outside of Theater 24.

Downton Abbey was everything a thirtysomething girl with a predilection for British history could want. I cried a couple times but way less because of what was going on on-screen and way more because of the relief I felt falling into 1927 and the Downton world. It did not grieve me like my modern-day Wednesday grieved me.

SOMETIMES IN THE MIDDLE of a tragedy, someone needs to make you laugh. Sometimes in the middle of a heartbreak, you need to ride a roller coaster.

When he broke up with me on a Monday, I had tickets to see Wicked that coming Thursday with a bunch of friends. The woman playing Glinda the Good Witch was Ginna Claire Mason Moffett. She and I had connected on Twitter, and I had interviewed her for my podcast the week before. I loved her right away. Ginna Claire’s parents live in Nashville, so we did the podcast interview on the floor of the guest room in her childhood home. It was a super funny way to record a conversation, but it made for the start of one of the dearest friendships in my life.

On Thursday, my girlfriends and I sat and enjoyed the show. I cried my way through two songs, wrapping myself up in the experience and also remembering that just outside those theater doors was a world where I was no longer in a relationship with that man. The show ended, and my group went to the stage door and waited for Ginna Claire’s dad to come lead us backstage to her dressing room.

Ginna Claire had filled that dressing room to the brim with pink, including a step and repeat place: a long sheet hung by a curtain rod, where she could take pictures with friends and fans like us. You step in for a picture, step out, and repeat with the next person (hence the name “step and repeat”). Everyone met Ginna Claire and hugged her, and then we got to meet Mary Kate Morrissey, the incredibly talented woman who played Elphaba. Ginna Claire grabbed my hand and pulled me toward her dressing table and mirror, the kind with bright lights all the way around it. On the table beside her makeup and wigs sat a tiny tub of glitter. She opened it and carefully dipped her finger inside. Then she tapped her glittery finger to the side of my left eye and to the side of my right eye.

She didn’t know about the man. She had no idea what was happening in my heart. But there was something in that moment that felt like a gift, felt like God reaching down and patting on my wounded heart.

Fun shows up like that sometimes. One of my favorite parts of hearing all my podcast guests talk about what sounds fun to them is the variety of answers I receive. People will tell of meals they have had that they’d like to have again, trips they are dreaming of, books they want to read, and people they want to spend time with. But every now and again, they just want to do something normal, self-labeled as “small.” And even though those things aren’t as flashy, fun shows up in those things too. It can be a vacation or a volunteer opportunity, friendship or fried foods. It’s everywhere, if you’re looking. If you let God gift you a glimpse of Eden, He will.

It matters that we talk about how to find fun in a life that doesn’t always go the way we think it will. It is important for us to start finding the glitter on the days that hurt too much. (It doesn’t have to be real glitter. I know most of y’all probably hate it.) We need to dream of foreign places and foreign languages and foreign foods on the tables where we sit and eat our everyday meals. Fun is a word we throw around a lot, me on a daily and pretty much constant basis, but it isn’t as light and breezy as you think.

I saw a live podcast a few weeks ago, and the host, actor Dax Shepherd, gave the audience a couple minutes to ask questions. One young woman in the front row asked him, “How do you get through the hard times in life?” Dax didn’t even pause. He looked her right in the eyes and said, “Just remember it always ends. You never get on a roller coaster and think, This is so fun, I will be here forever. The best things end, and so do the worst things. This will end.”1 I thought that was a profound and very tangible example for when we forget that the bad days don’t last forever and that the good days don’t last forever either.

But you know that. You know the rush always wears off. You know the laughter eventually stops. You know the sun will set, or rise, and the fun of today will end. It is one of the disappointing things about alcohol or a date or anything that seems to promise you a high that always lasts a few minutes less than you hoped it would. It ends. It always does. Even the purest, truest fun doesn’t last forever. It is always a glimpse of something bigger, something we miss.

But that doesn’t mean we stop asking the question, What sounds fun to you? In fact, I would say it is more necessary the more you understand that neither joy nor pain last forever, and it is far better to hold them both at the same time than to lean your life too heavily on one or the other. Knowing what sounds fun to you is about more than just filling your time and having an answer to a question at a party (or the end of a podcast interview). To know what sounds fun to you, what uniquely brings a level of joy and peace and simple rest to your heart, is what reminds you that God’s journey for your life includes glimpses of Eden that show up in smile lines on your face and laughter that sounds just like you and art made from your unique spot on this planet.