What Lies Beneath!

Every time I learn of someone else’s very real, very raw life journey, the ones who have been “through it and back”, I am stopped in my tracks, in awe of human resilience. 

I find myself thinking about their story and reliving it in my mind, so closely that I feel it, breathe it, and at times even dream it.

The ability to bounce back after devastating loss is more than inspiring. It is the behavior that puts everything in perspective. 

And it is painful. 

It’s painful to those who have also been through the fire because in some way, we relive our own story as we listen and take in the pain of someone else.

So many silent heroes exist out there, just moving along as if yesterday were an easy breeze and tomorrow is a guaranteed win. 

But drive a little closer to their edge and essence and you come away with a piece of hard drive reality. 

You get a sense of their edge and what it feels, sounds, and looks like. 

Sometimes the images are so detailed and graphic… so moving that it takes a while to reach an even keel.

It is similar to that gut wrenching feeling of tilting over too far on two wheels and straining to right the balance. You never quite catch your breath after that.

And you certainly can’t “un-hear it”.

There are stories you will never know about, because they are covered with an invisible shield. 

You can’t see through the shield because you’re not even sure it exists. 

As a matter of fact you may have missed it entirely.

But it is there.  

And the story waits to be told till someone unlocks the key on that shield. 

There is a secret to unlocking the key. 

You have to develop the ability to see beyond the smile.

Once you see beyond the smile, the shield silently dislodges and you can see within.

When you peel back those proverbial layers, you get complexity, complications, and horrifically raw cross sections of pain and growth. 

When you listen with your heart to their words, see with piercing empathy, and compute with understanding, then you get the real story, the one beneath the smile. 

This is hard work…to see beyond and see within. But it is worth the care you give it.

You come to understand what has made that person who he is, who she is.

You come to understand all the work that has gone into the outer grace that she or he projects. 

You come to a place of true understanding… a rare occurrence.

And if you have won their trust, the shield eventually fades in your presence.

Those moments are golden and need to be carefully held. 

One tiny drop in trust and the shield is back up and locked.

Our world is full of people who have suffered pain and experiences we find hard to relate to. Some of them are our neighbors.

It is also a wide, wide world of differences and barriers of all kinds, including ones of language and race; age and gender, political, social, economic, and cultural viewpoints. 

There is so much unknown in this divisive world. 

Countless shields are up and secured tightly.  

There is great risk in looking beyond the smile.

It is at times daunting to pursue what is real at the risk of losing the comfortable feeling we find in surface relationships. 

It could mean turning your own perspective upside down. 

It could mean yielding our own shields a bit. 

It could cost us vulnerability. 

I don’t think we are here just to skim the surface of friendship. 

I think we are here to make a difference in people’s lives and in so doing make a difference in our own. 

As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as pioneers. 

We eagerly set our goals to explore outer space, but what if in addition to that, we set our hearts to explore a different space…inner space. 

You never know what we might learn.

You never know what lies beneath.