There are shows like Always Sunny, GIRLS and Sex and the City that I’ve practically memorized because I’ve watched them so many times. I actually made a point of going a year without watching Always Sunny, because I wanted it to feel new. But I was only able to watch Fleabag once, not because it wasn’t compelling, but because I stumbled upon it at a time in my life where I couldn’t really handle it. I had doubts about the integrity of a friend, and watching a show that depicted such a devastating betrayal only heightened those emotions.
But like most of my other essays that incorporate pop culture, you don’t have to actually be familiar with it to understand the point I’m trying to make.
Fleabag follows a troubled woman struggling to connect with anyone in her life. She has a contentious, complicated relationship with her family. She did the worst thing you can do to another woman to her best friend, who killed herself (albeit accidentally) after the fact. She has self destructive habits and sleeps with strangers haphazardly and constantly.
Then, after years of detachment, irony and emotional isolation, she finds what she didn’t even know she was looking for in the last place she thought it would be.
She meets a man that she has an intense, unique chemistry with. “Chemistry” almost seems like too simplistic of a descriptor. It’s not like they just got along really well or were attracted to one another; it was the kind of affection and intimacy that changes life trajectory.
But ultimately, they couldn’t be together.
In one of the most memorable lines of the show, she tells him she loves him, and he takes her hand, looks her dead in the eyes and promises, “it’ll pass.”
Even though he says it with all of the tenderness and compassion in the world, it feels tragic, and like the kind of thing that can’t be recovered from. It almost felt incomplete, or like wishful thinking rather than something that was even remotely realistic.
When I first watched that scene, I was in the middle of sorrow I never thought would end. I remember sobbing feeling less like an action and more like a state of being. It was only a few years ago. It seemed so permanent as it was happening, and now it’s just something that happened. And it wasn’t the first time.
I recently came across reflections I’d written over a decade ago, spanning my junior year of high school to my sophomore year of college.
I could barely believe my eyes as I read them.
I wrote something along the lines of, “he’s the first guy I’ve ever loved and will probably be the last” as I was sulking over the football player I met at SAT prep.
I don’t know if I’ve ever cringed so hard in my life.
Of course I didn’t love him. I have no ill will towards him but even then I knew on some level that he wasn’t that smart and he really wasn’t that funny; he was just gorgeous and my brain was still developing. But 17-year-old me thought it was the end of the world, and couldn’t imagine getting over him.
But it wasn’t and I did.
Eventually, if we’re lucky, we grow and mature. We fall for people holistically; not superficially. But even after you’re older and wiser than you used to be, you realize that you’re never quite as old or wise as you think you are. You realize that the heart is just as deceitful at 28 and 64 as it was at 17. From God’s point of view, I was probably just as hysterical and shortsighted the first time I watched Fleabag in my late 20s as I was over a decade earlier. And that whether romantic, financial, social, or physical, you will find yourself in situations you can’t imagine surviving.
You will find yourself struggling to hold onto hope, your faith and God Himself. His Words may feel empty and distant, and like they couldn’t possibly apply to whatever it is you’re going through.
But it’ll pass.
Probably not as quickly as you’d like, and probably not the way you thought it would.
But God will not abandon you.
That doesn’t mean He’s going to wave His hand one day and your most difficult trials will suddenly disappear. But that if you cling to Him even when you can’t begin to understand what He’s allowing to happen in your life or why, He won’t sit on the sidelines forever watching you suffer – even if that’s what it feels like He’s doing at your lowest points.
The devil wants us to think He will, because that’s where he has the most opportunity. He wants us hopeless, letting our temporary emotions override God’s eternal truths. But after God took everything from Job, and Job responded the way most of us do, God answered him with one of the most stunning and humbling declarations in the Bible. God spent 3 chapters reminding Job and humanity exactly who He is and who we are in comparison. We will never comprehend His plans for our lives, and that’s by design.
“I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.”
I don’t necessarily think that if you lose your job, it means God is preparing you for a new position that will double your salary or that if you endure a debilitating heartbreak it’s to clear the way for a spouse that’s hotter, wittier and more compatible. But I do know that God will not leave you to languish in your misery and that the pain He allows often serves a purpose.
In my own experience, it was particularly difficult to deal with what God allowed when adversity came disguised as an answered prayer.
When we realize what we thought was a blessing is probably supposed to be a lesson, I think we’re at our most vulnerable. That’s when we begin to feel forsaken, furious, forlorn or some combination of the three. We often feel shortchanged and swindled by the Father that was supposed to be protecting us, even if that’s exactly what He did by withholding what we thought we wanted.
But God used the circumstances I didn’t know I’d survive years ago made me the freest, the best and the closest to Him I’ve ever been.
What I convinced myself would never pass eventually did, but God’s love never did and it never will.
Pray when you feel like no one’s listening. Bury yourself in scripture even when you’re struggling to believe it. And go to church even when it feels pointless. And as you push yourself to do what seems fruitless, God will bring you a harvest you never saw coming.
I think eventually, we’ll all find ourselves in situations that we can’t imagine moving on from.
But the more I’ve grown in my walk with God, the more I’ve realized that nothing you think will haunt you forever actually does.
what do you think?