Fate , fear and Candy Corn

 

Back from the USA after being a den mom to 14 wonderful Nicaraguans…..and I am asked “How was it?”  I think I have a way to answer how it changed me…..you will have to ask our crew what they thought!

When we hear that life is bittersweet, we don’t really “get” what that means. We get sweet. It is warm and fulfilling. Sweet is gooey hot fresh chocolate chip cookies, and fresh bread and strawberry jam. Sweet is laughing until tears are coming out of your eyes and your sides hurt. Sweet is the contentment of a sofa and a movie, or a fire at the end of Christmas day. Sweet is the praise and the raise. Sweet is that “ahhhh” moment on the beach when the breeze, the sun and the water all coincide to feel delicious on your skin and your mind just stops running around like a frantic mouse with your thoughts.

We all crave the sweet. From the moment we are born we want sweet warm milk and our needs met. It feels safe and we will sometimes go overboard to have it.

But somewhere along the way bitter sets in. It enters and we cannot yank off its octopus tentacles into our souls. Bitter we want to spit out immediately and run away from. Wash out the taste and the sharp pungency.

Bitter is disappointment that no one invited you to prom, or she said no. Bitter is seeing someone else get the raise that you want. Bitter is watching loved ones leave and illness invade. Bitter is the mad conversations we have with ourselves alone and in the car with our family, or our boss, or our government. Bitter makes us afraid. Makes us angry. Makes us not want to share, and be mean because of the evil of resentment in our life. It feels wrong and we will sometimes go overboard to get rid of it.

With the Nicaraguans in the USA this past time, I had a chance to see an interesting anomaly.  They take in both the bitter and the sweet. They aren’t afraid of their fate.

You see, Fear makes us bitter. We keep spitting it out and blaming the world for placing it on our tongues. We have become sweet addicts not realizing that our fate demands both. With the Nicaraguans here, I noticed that the bitter in their life is recognized, and the door for its entrance even opened to acknowledge its presence. But it is not spit out with disgust, but rather noticed and gently set aside. The sweet is invited in with an amazing amount of zeal, but not hoarded or stored for later. They thoroughly enjoy it all at once.

So what can I learn from this? In the USA we have an abundance of sweet…our culture has created traditions and opportunities to allow the sweet to enter. But unfortunately the fear of this being taken away from us, and the isolation of technology has made us “Bitter-haters”.  We are unable to say to ourselves “There is sadness, and difficulties in this world, and I will greet them the same as the joy and the laughter...I will allow these to shape me”. Because we yank off the tentacles, they grip harder and hurt more when they are ripped off. If we could learn to recognize that the bitter helps us taste the sweet better, we might not be so aggressive in our attempts to eradicate it from our lives. If I,  if we, can allow the bitter and the sweet to be a part of our lives, we might just be better humans…. more human, and more relationship oriented and less alone.

So what does this have to do with candy corn? The Nicas loved it…so do I, and all my children. But you can’t eat a lot…it is just too sweet. And you can’t have it whenever you want, only in the fall, only near Halloween.  So I bought a few bags and I am taking it back to my daughters in Nicaragua. It is a fall tradition that we love, and it makes us happy to have it and a little sad to miss the autumns in Georgia. It is a bittersweet feeling, eating candy corn while we are hot and  with no little children trick-or-treating. But we open the door to the experience; allow the sadness and the happiness in together. It is where God has fated us to be for now. 

And I am reminded that life is better when it is bittersweet.