Laura’s beautiful post on sehnsucht got me thinking this week (if you haven’t read it yet, you should! My post will make much more sense!).

What is it that allows me to find fabulous in the common?

It has been a particularly challenging couple of weeks. So digging down to find beauty in cleaning up the 37th pile of cat puke or the 102nd glass of spilled soapy-glitter-water-fairy-dust-concoction may have produced a few mumbled expletives and much more yelling and fist pounding than was necessary.

So, I started watching for the transcendent beauty around me.

Sigh.

I wish I could say that I find all my inspiration in the sweet smell of sehnsucht wafting out of a panoramic sunset, woven through the tiny intricacies of a monarch resting in Nick’s garden, or intertwined with Lidia’s infectious laugh.

But I can’t.

Often now, this soul-nourishing beauty is crushing, deflating and debilitating. I return to my life, look around, and can only see the drabness, the endless monotony and frustrations. I think partly it is the season of life in which I find myself, where the sum of my daily efforts do not culminate in a beautiful aria that allows people to reach out to infinity. Right now, because of the huge number of pressing, urgent daily needs, it is so easy to get lost in the world that only surrounds my immediate family. However, over the past few days, I spent a lot of time thinking and rediscovering the lens through which I am able to discern the fabulous hiding in the common.

I need to see the agony of real life juxtaposed with the beautiful foreshadowing hope of sehnsucht. Then I need to let this juxtaposition inspire me to confront the agony and work to bring the reality closer to the hope.

I first experienced this my senior year of high school when I spent two weeks at The Channel, a school for kids living in a favela of Fortaleza, Brazil. I spent the entire trip completely dumbfounded. I had never before seen such extreme poverty right next to such extreme wealth. I had never seen such pain. Such despair. Yet, I honestly had never seen such hope, drive and joy as I did in the kids who attended the school. At the school, the kids were told they were important and their life had a purpose. They were given a hope, a glimpse of what should be. They all lived in a nightmare, but those kids did not let the darkness engulf them. They looked outside of themselves, saw the light in each other, and helped carry the pain of their friends and family. Despite the darkness, the sehnsucht let them see even the tiniest bit of light and beauty in the most common things – homework, laughing with a friend, a bowl of bland rice, a barefoot game of soccer.

 It completely changed me.

There is something forcefully moving for me when I am reminded of the depths of the darkness that exists in the world. It drives me out of my narcissistic pity party. It puts my challenges into perspective and helps me distinguish between real hardship and mere irritation. It allows me to see my prosperity more clearly and share it with others. It helps me identify, ask for and accept when I really need help. The menial, monotonous and mundane tasks that make up most of what I do each day suddenly seem like a gift, because the utter darkness makes even the faintest light seem like a beacon. Suddenly, sehnsucht is not a taunting spotlight that only serves to illuminates how lacking my life is, but is the aspiring hope that gives me the inspiration to fight the darkness.

I really only want to see the beautiful. But I realize that I need to accept them both together, the agony and the sehnsucht. The excruciating beauty that ignores the present reality makes my life seem unbearably common. Facing the agony without the hope leaves me utterly forlorn. Sehnsucht gives life meaning and hope. Agony forces me to have drive and purpose.

I think this is why we are called to bear each other’s burdens. It is why it is so important to us that we cultivate a habit of service and outward thinking in our girls. This is why we are filling up our garage with other people’s garbage. This is why I love organizations like The Channel and Preemptive Love Coalition, who confront the agony, but inspire us with the hope and beauty of sehnsucht.

Because it helps me to see the fabulous in my own common, and inspires me to diminish the agony of others. If I could only just remember. 😉