25/31 days of madeleine

By midnight tomorrow I want to have finished all 31 days of Madeleine. Which means you’re in for a tidal wave of L’Engle posts. Hope you’re excited about that. 🙂

That’s the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they’ve been all along.

This summer, Emily and I embarked on a journey called WATCHING THE HILLS. It started out one evening in the program office, and lead to an entire day of watching in the Zone and since then we have been watching them separately. She’s in the middle of Season 6. I’m at the end of Season 3. So we’ve kind of gone our own ways.

I’m at the part where Lauren apologizes to Audrina for being so controlling and overprotective about Justin Bobby. She doesn’t want to see her friends get hurt, which is noble, but in doing so she tends to push them away because she tries to protect them.

One of the kindest things we can do for our friends is step aside and let them fall. That sounds really awful, I know. But you can only tell a child “that stove is hot” so many times before they have to touch it and figure it out all on their own. The lesson is learned through experience. C.S. Lewis says that experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn, my God do you learn.

I remember a time when I gave one of my friends an ultimatum. Him or me, essentially. I’d just grown tired of back-and-forth, on-and-off when the whole thing didn’t seem worth it. I didn’t want to pay for another late-night meal going over the exact same thing for the seventy thousandth time. That ultimatum isn’t my proudest moment. Luckily, our friendship was strong enough to push past that.

And guess what? She figured it out all on her own. We went back to good ol’ Shari’s and she told me everything I’d given up on trying to tell her. She understood. All of it.

Chronology is an important teacher. For others, and for ourselves. But sometimes it’s good to take the input of others to heart, because they often see things better than we do.