I unexpectedly had some free time this evening so I figured it was about time to wrap up a blog entry I started almost two weeks ago! It is a bit long but that is a hazard of reading my blog I guess!
As Valentine’s Day came to a close, I was frittering away some time on Facebook while trying to avoid posting my first impressions of the mushier postings from enamored couples and came across the following quote: "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine!" I immediately recognized from one of my favorite movies of all time, Casablanca. It is uttered by one of the main characters and the owner of a classy club, Rick, when he is surprised to see a woman he never expected to see again. The following exhange, occurring later in the movie, provides us with clearer insight on his feelings:
Ilsa: Rick, I have to talk to you.
Rick: [Rick is drunk] Uh-huh. I saved my first drink to have with you. Here.
[passes her a drink]
Ilsa: No. No, Rick, not tonight.
Rick: *Especially* tonight.
Ilsa: Please...
[he pours a drink]
Rick: Why did you have to come to Casablanca? There are other places.
Ilsa: I wouldn't have come if I'd known that you were here. Believe me Rick, it's true I didn't know...
Rick: It's funny about your voice, how it hasn't changed. I can still hear it. Richard, dear, I'll go with you anyplace. We'll get on a train together and never stop -
Ilsa: Don't, Rick! I can understand how you feel.
Rick: [scoffs] You understand how I feel. How long was it we had, honey?
Ilsa: [on the verge of tears] I didn't count the days.
Rick: Well, I did. Every one of 'em. Mostly I remember the last one. The wild finish. A guy standing on a station platform in the rain with a comical look in his face because his insides have been kicked out.
Ilsa: Can I tell you a story, Rick?
Rick: Has it got a wild finish?
Ilsa: I don't know the finish yet.
Rick: Well, go on. Tell it - maybe one will come to you as you go along.
Ilsa: It's about a girl who had just come to Paris from her home in Oslo. At the house of some friends, she met a man about whom she'd heard her whole life. A very great and courageous man. He opened up for her a whole beautiful world full of knowledge and thoughts and ideals. Everything she knew or ever became was because of him. And she looked up to him and worshiped him... with a feeling she supposed was love.
Rick: [bitterly] Yes, it's very pretty. I heard a story once - as a matter of fact, I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs. Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid, it always began.
[laughs]
Rick: Well, I guess neither one of our stories is very funny. Tell me, who was it you left me for? Was it Lazlo, or were there others in between or... aren't you the kind that tells?
[Ilsa tearfully and silently leaves. Rick's face falls in his hands sadly, knowing that he's said all the wrong things]
While I think highly of Casablanca and won’t ruin it by telling you the ending, this part of the story doesn’t seem a whole lot different from many love stories on the big screen. They tend to follow a basic cinematic sequence: Couple meets, falls in love, complications ensue, someone gets hurt and then we move on to reconciliation, and hopefully, a happy (though often cheesy) ending.
The excerpt above is clearly somewhere after the “someone gets hurt” part! Though Rick’s bitter words are not especially surprising coming from someone who describes himself as “A guy standing on a station platform in the rain with a comical look in his face because his insides have been kicked out,” it doesn’t seem that getting his feelings out there makes him feel any better. I suspect that the expression “To have loved and lost is better than to have never loved at all” wouldn’t have gone over too well with Rick; at least not while the woman he loved (and lost) is standing in front of him.
Now I could make this a post about forgiveness, but I am not going to do that. Frankly, I don’t really know what it feels like to get my insides kicked out so I am not sure I could write a compelling entry on that subject anyway. If you read the title and can still remember it at this point, you know that I am writing instead about brokenness.
So anyway, Rick’s words pretty cut pretty deeply into Llsa. While she probably deserved it, she got an unwanted opportunity to feel a bit of the agonizing pain that Rick described for her so bitterly. In his pain, only partially buried in his drunkenness, he lashed out at the woman he had once loved and found that his pain only grew stronger. He had expected her to show up and she had left him for a wealthier man who could provide security and perhaps, she thought, a better future. Now, after he expected never to see her again, both she and that man now depend on Rick to get them out of the country and safe from the Nazis. If anyone has a reason to be bitter, it is Rick.
But enough about a couple of characters in a movie, let’s bring this home to real life. Perhaps you can identify too easily with the pain that Rick describes. Perhaps you offered your heart to someone who didn’t want it. Perhaps you gave a piece of your heart to someone who played with it as a cat toys with a mouse and discarded it in much the same matter. Perhaps you gave your heart to someone who didn’t deserve it and ended up like Rick “with your insides [your heart] kicked out.” Perhaps you aren’t sure what happened but you feel like that your dreams of loving and being loved by someone special have died with the hopes that harbored them. Whatever the cause, you feel bruised, battered, and perhaps even irreparably broken.
But broken isn’t where it ends-at least not where it has to end... We can choose to seek healing or we can live on as best we can without it. Of course it isn’t just that simple. We aren’t very good at healing ourselves (perhaps we weren’t designed that way?) And the desire to be whole isn’t going to provide a salve for our wounds-especially not the empty hole that remains from a heart sacrificed on the altar of selfish love. (That is love with a lower-case “l.”) If we look around us, we can find a lot of broken-hearted people who have let bitterness and discouragement fill the void where once love reigned. Some of them have even worked really hard to find healing, -in other relationships, in a career, in possessions, in music, in nature, in spirituality, in drugs and/or alcohol, in food-the list goes on but the results are usually the same. Whether it is visible only in the rare times when their guard is down or erupts often in bitter words like lava from an active volcano, the brokenness remains…
…But it doesn’t have to. While I don’t think we will ever be completely whole while we walk this earth, we need not look much farther than the God in whom we claim to place our hope for hope in our brokenness and healing. No, I am not saying that God is a Band-Aid for anything that ails us. Perhaps some of the brokenness we feel comes from our own decisions to choose our own way when He had other plans for us. Or maybe our hurt comes from others who chose their plans over His. Either way, He isn’t a God of trite answers to hard questions, conditional love, and quick fixes. Who better to love the broken-hearted than One whose heart was broken? Rejected and betrayed by his closest friends, cursed by the multitudes who first greeted him as king, mocked, whipped, beaten, and crucified while the Father turned a blind eye, Jesus experienced brokenness in a way that most, if not all, of us cannot even imagine! Jesus had very good reason to be bitter and to leave us in our suffering just as those He loved left Him, or even drove the nails through his hands and feet! Yet, he reaches out to us in our brokenness and offers wholeness that only He can give. He stands at the door to your heart knocking. Will you cling to your bitterness or let Him clean out the darkness, cleanse your wounds, and bring healing? Will you let your hurt rule you life or will you let Him?
