A Bolt From The Blue

“I’m criticized but all your bullets ricochet
You shoot me down, but I get up
I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose
Fire away, fire away
Ricochet, you take your aim
Fire away, fire away
You shoot me down but I won’t fall,
I am titanium.“
– David Guetta

When I first heard this song, “Titanium,” I loved the words.  I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to be bulletproof?  To say, “I’ve got nothing to lose, so take your best shot.  I’m titanium.”  I put the song on repeat and sang it to myself, sort of like a little pep talk.  But the more I listened to it, the more I realized that the words didn’t fit me.  And it didn’t matter how hard I tried, I would never be bulletproof and as strong and impermeable as titanium.  I’m more like aluminum foil—easily crumpled and scratched.  I’m very sensitive and easily hurt.  Sometimes the ugliness in the world stings me to the point that I feel it physically.  I feel beauty, pain, and sadness in a deep, gut-wrenching way.  In the words of Jack Kerouac,  “It’s all too much and not enough at the same time.”

For most of my life, I hated that about myself.  I didn’t understand why l felt everything—big or small—so deeply.  I wanted to be carefree.  I wanted to be part of the world instead of always trying to protect myself from the world.  And I wanted to make sense out of that world—to explain it to myself in a way that made it easier to live in.  I wanted to be strong, bulletproof—titanium.  I saw other people in my life who seemed to be that way.  They weren’t always tilting from one extreme to the other.  They weren’t hurt by trivialities and beaten down by feeling too much.  They just seemed to handle life so much better than I did.  And though I tried desperately to be like that, I couldn’t.  To me, life was a never-ending pendulum ride, swinging from pain and sadness to beauty and joy and back again, sometimes from minute to minute.  And it felt like too much to bear.

But then something wonderful happened—I got struck by lightning.  Well, not literally, according to all of the scientifically-minded people in my family.  But I did have lightning strike in such a way that my ears hurt from the boom of thunder, my flip flops flew off, and the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.  The sky was astoundingly beautiful in that split second—filled with pinks and lavenders and silver threads.  I probably would have stood there gaping at it for as long as it lasted, if Monty hadn’t been there, hollering at me to get in the car.  When I got in, soaked, barefoot, and awestruck, I kept saying to Monty, “Did you see that?!”  After he finished lecturing me about the dangers of standing around staring at the sky in a lightning storm, he said, “Yeah.  That was cool.”

Cool?  No.  Astonishingly beautiful.  Awe-inspiring.  God in one of His most majestic hours.  Rapturously soul-stirring.  Not just “cool.”  Later that night, I was writing in my gratitude journal, and I thanked God for that amazing experience.  As I was writing, Monty walked into the room, talking about the interesting weather patterns that caused the storm—and I realized that Monty and I had had two completely different experiences of that thunder storm.  Monty had seen a “cool” storm—and he loved knowing about the science behind it.  I, on the other hand, had been caught up in a moment of beauty that made my heart almost hurt from the wonder of it.  And both of those experiences—Monty’s and mine—were legitimate.  God wired Monty’s mind to understand the scientific aspects of that storm.  He wired mine to experience its beauty.

And then came the epiphany—the bolt from the blue, as it were.  If I didn’t feel everything so deeply, I wouldn’t have experienced that moment the way I had.  The sensitivity that I had always hated about myself had made me sensitive to the beauty of that moment.  So maybe, just maybe, my greatest “curse,” as I had always thought of it, was also my greatest blessing.  And God had given that to me when He made me.  Psalm 139:13-14 says, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”  God “knit” me together.  I love that image.  I’ve seen people knit, and it’s an intricate, complex process that converts a skein of yarn into something beautiful.  God knit me together and made me exactly the way He thought I should be.  So who am I to rail against Him and complain about the way that He made me?  Why would I try to change the very thing that He so “fearfully and wonderfully” made?

The Serenity Prayer says, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”  I wish it hadn’t taken me so long, but I’ve finally accepted the fact that I cannot change the fundamental nature that God gave me.  The greatest desire of my heart is to make God known, and I want to use everything He’s given me to do that—even the nature that I fought against for so long.  Yes, life hurts me—and at times, it nearly breaks me.  But then there’s that moment of beauty–and I’m mended again.  If I were “titanium,” I wouldn’t get to experience those beautiful moments like I do. I probably wouldn’t have such a need to write about them, either.  So I choose to be grateful for all of it, and pray that God somehow uses it.  Because that would make everything—the pain, the darkness, the beauty, and the light—more valuable to me than even the most bulletproof of hearts.