Too Late to Apologize?

Recently I've been realizing that one of my greatest fears in life is that I will permanently and single-handedly ruin everything. And I mean everything. Forever.

My fiancé Jason realized this before I did. He told me I wasn't allowed to use the word ruin anymore, that it wasn't helpful, that I didn't know how to use it correctly. He says that someday I will get my privileges back, but not for a long while.

About a year ago, I began to feel this deep fear about Jason - that I had ruined everything with him forever. We had been good friends in college. He was in love with me the whole time. I was not in love with him the whole time. And I didn't know that he was actually in love with me. He was. Then he asked me out about 6 years ago. I said no forever. But he didn't tell me he actually loved me. How was I supposed to know?

But then, last March, I rediscovered a letter he had written to me after we both graduated from Muhlenberg College. It was the best letter I've ever read. I remembered thinking so back in 2009 when I first read it. But I had forgotten about it in the meantime. Nothing had ever happened. He never asked me out or anything. Well, not until 2011, that is. And that was a long time after the first time I read this letter.

This letter was like a love letter in which he told me he loved me in every way possible without ever really coming out and saying it. And it was just what I needed to hear last March. I needed to know that someone saw me, not just as someone who ruined everything forever, but as someone intentionally created by God.

It's like he took out all of the bad things about me and only left the good things. And that's how he described me in this letter. And that's how he saw me. He saw the core of how God made me and called it very good. Like how I dance whenever possible. Jason saw that about me and said it was good, instead of silly. And I needed to hear those good things, because I usually only see the bad things. Like me ruining everything forever.

And so as I reread this letter one year ago, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I couldn't help but think to myself, "I think he still loves me. I think he loved me the whole time. I think this relationship might be worth a try." But within the same thought, my fear crept in..."But it's probably too late. I think I've probably ruined everything forever. I think even if I apologized now, he would say he's already moved on, that he's not in love with me anymore."

So I began to feel like my life was actually an Adele song. Each time I got in my car, I would play Hello, belt it out, and cry. I would always cry hardest at the part where she says,

Hello from the outside
At least I can say that I've tried
To tell you I'm sorry for breaking your heart
But it don't matter it clearly doesn't tear you apart anymore

And I imagined myself trying to tell Jason how sorry I was and that I was stupid for not realizing how much he loved me sooner and saying that I wanted to try to make things work with us. But in my imaginings, he would always just turn me away. And that's why I would cry. I didn't want to have ruined everything. I didn't want him to stop loving me. 

So that's what I told him. After I apologized for telling him no forever. And after he told me he couldn't be my friend without having feelings for me. I said I didn't want him to not have feelings for me. Then he reminded me that when I told him no forever I asked him to try to stop having feelings for me. I told him that's because I was an idiot. 

He never stopped loving me though. I might have told him to stop. But he didn't. And I was afraid that I had ruined everything forever. But I really hadn't. It wasn't too late to apologize. One Republic was wrong. My apology mattered. It moved our story forward so that we could become friends again.  And then Jason could finally admit he always thought we were like Ross and Rachel. It's like everyone else knew that we were supposed to be together, but we just couldn't seem to figure out how to make that happen. But then we did. 

So it really wasn't too late to apologize. Justin Bieber's fears could be put to rest. And my life stopped being an Adele song. I actually told Jason about how I thought my life mirrored Hello for a while and how I thought all of this business about our relationship didn't tear him apart anymore. He told me I was wrong. He had been torn apart. So much so that he failed 2 classes in seminary when he thought he'd lost me forever and couldn't even listen to Hello or the entire album for that matter. He knew I loved Adele and thought it would be too much for him to handle, because there's no way he could listen to it and not think about me. After he told me that, we listened to 25 together. I thought that was important.

But even if Jason had moved on and the apology came too late for us to be together, it still wouldn't have meant that everything was ruined. And it still would have been right for me to apologize. Because when it looks like everything is ruined, it's not. It just means the story isn't done yet. It just means you're in the middle. And the middle has a whole lot of ups and downs and twists and turns. And they're really painful. But that's what makes the story. Without them, there would be no story at all. It would just be a series of boring events, leading nowhere. And who wants a life like that?

So the important thing that I have been learning is not to confuse a story's negative turns with the ending. Jason and Donald Miller have been helping me with that. Because any good storyteller knows that the ending must be glorious. I can make intentional choices to make my story go better. And I might make bad choices, even accidentally. But that never means everything is ruined. I can still keep moving forward, one thing at a time. And eventually those all add up. Plus some things just happen that I don't have any control over - both good and bad. That's just part of how any story happens. And somehow God just weaves all of those things together to make something beautiful. And I trust God. I think that He's a good storyteller. So that must mean whatever ending is ahead must be glorious.

Lemonade - Uncomfortable Yet Refreshing

When Beyonce's Formation dropped at the Super Bowl, I honestly wasn't impressed. I didn't understand or connect with the references. And when friends started blowing up my newsfeed with the Hold Up video, I seriously didn't know what all the commotion was about. This was not the Beyonce I had come to know and love. I wanted songs that were reserved for nonstop radio play. I wanted to dance to something fun like Crazy in Love. I wanted to cry to another ballad like If I Were a Boy. And it was clear that this new album was not going to give me what I wanted. So without really giving it much thought, I wrote off this new Beyonce. I just didn't like this new music that seemed to highlight vulgarity and a culture that clearly did not include me. Quite frankly, I didn't think Lemonade really lived up to all the hype.

But as time went on, it became increasingly clear to me that others really loved this album. It seemed to help them - empower them. But I didn't really know how or why. And I was perplexed by the fact that we had such opposite reactions to the same collection of music. So I began to think these tensions were worth exploring. And especially after Adele's speech at the Grammy's, claiming that Beyonce deserved to win Album of the Year, instead of her, that seemed like too bold of a statement to ignore. 

Now, after watching the Lemonade visual album, and giving it some serious thought, I find my perspective quite changed. The album features a number of interesting themes worth exploring - including the ill treatment of blacks, women, and black women, in particular.  But for now, I will just stick with a discussion of how the album handles grief and healing. 

The genius of the Lemonade album is that it is a visual and musical depiction of the grieving process. And I believe that's part of the reason we love it and hate it at the same time. 

Beyonce has woven several narratives together throughout her work, and one of them follows the discovery of a cheating husband. She places this discovery in the midst of a historical context that runs in "her blood." She refers to it as "the curse," knowing that it is the same plight shared by women in her family and black women throughout the centuries. The album walks through her discovery of "the curse" until she finds the "remedy." Each song fits with each stage of the narrative from Intuition, to Denial, to Anger, to Apathy, to Emptiness, to Loss, to Accountability, to Reformation, to Forgiveness, to Resurrection, to Hope, and finally to Redemption. She deals with each stage musically and visually in a way that is so fitting for such a vulnerable, upsetting, and ugly topic that the whole album possess a quality that is uncomfortable yet refreshing.

I think that's why I dismissed the album so quickly at first. It made me uncomfortable. I didn't want a Beyonce who would curse or use vulgar language or gestures. I wanted a Beyonce who was there to make me feel good, who created music to give me an excuse to dance. I wanted a Beyonce who would quickly go through the stages of a struggle within a well produced 4 minute song. I wanted a quicker resolution than Lemonade gave me. And that usually what's I want in life too.

But what Beyonce has done with this album is better than what I wanted, and her path to healing is far more effective than the one I usually take. She dives headfirst into the overwhemingly uncomfortable nature of the fact that things are not as they should be. Beyonce has taken her musical brush to paint grief as ugly as it really is. And that honest assessment of reality is where the true healing begins. But the very thing that makes healing possible is the thing that most of us are so uncomfortable with.

We are ok with grief that has already turned into something beautiful, but we have trouble with grief that still looks messy. It's a pill that's usually too hard for us to swallow. We would rather try to fix a situation, making it our goal to try to snap others out of their anger, sadness, or hopelessness. So we try to calm people down, tell them to stop whining and complaining, and hope that they'll put on a happy face. And then we deceive ourselves into feeling like we've helped them somehow. Or at least, now we feel better. But we don't like messy grief. 

I remember when a friend started asking me why I didn't feel free to express my emotions after the house fire I was involved in this past year happened. I felt like I had to just be ok, to suck it up, to deal with it, to move on, to be fine. But I wasn't fine. And my friend gave me permission to allow myself to be sad and to be angry and to see where those emotions went. She reassured me that facing those darker emotions is a necessary and normal part of the grieving process and that if I stopped them in their tracks, I would truncate the healing that could otherwise occur. She was right.

And going through the grieving process myself has helped me to see the sadness and the anger and the apathy of Beyonce's album with fresh eyes. As I learned to be honest in the midst of my own grief, Lemonade's honesty became refreshing to me.  

I have lived life for so long thinking that I have to keep it all together and present a neatly wrapped package with a perfectly tied bow on top. But that's not life. Real life is hard and messy, and things happen to all of us that we know should never happen to anyone. And we all have to deal with that every day. So it's like a breath of fresh air to see someone use music to grapple with how sad and upsetting things really are, instead of just pretending everything is fine.

Deep down, I think we all know that real healing takes more than pretending. We have to be honest. And Lemonade has done what so few of us do by pushing right through the uncomfortable and digger deeper into the grief. Our girl B has to admit that she has died before she can resurrect - before she can start again. And I think that's the key to real healing that most of us miss. 

Beyonce recognizes what feels like her own death during the intro of the the song Sorry: "What are you going to say at my funeral now that you've killed me?" The life she had before the infidelity is gone, and she has to admit it and mourn it. Though it is unbelievably painful to recognize those things about our lives that are now dead, we can't get a resurrection any other way. In some ways it feels like things just have to keep getting worse before they get better. But once you hit the lowest level - death - the resurrection is just waiting to take over the story.

The fusion of the uncomfortable messiness of grief with refreshing honesty creates the real path to healing. And Lemonade shows us, not only that this path is possible, but that it actually works. By the end of the album, after singing songs of forgiveness and hope, Bey says, "True love brought salvation back into me. With every tear came redemption. And my torturer became my remedy. So we're gonna heal. We're gonna start again." She gives us our happy ending! But that happy ending would not be possible if she hadn't gone through the rest of the grieving process. 

So in the end, Lemonade is an amazing depiction of the fact that real life resurrections are possible. And we love a good resurrection. But a resurrection assumes that a death has occurred. That's why I believe this album must be uncomfortable in order to be refreshing. Embracing the sour is the only way to get to the sweet. And I think the more I grapple with that in my own life, the better off I'll be.

* Lest there be any confusion, let me set the record straight by saying that I do not promote profanity, vulgarity, or anything else that might be otherwise offensive or unhelpful to my readers and advise you to use your own discretion when deciding what is best for you to listen to or view. I merely wanted to point out the things that I found helpful about the Lemonade album, instead of getting distracted by what initially caused me to discredit it's value.