For those of you who haven’t seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s (sinners…) this contains some unintentional spoilers.
The picture is classic. The pose, the glasses, the jewels, the serene look.
Like I said. It’s classic. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, unless you’ve been in a hole since you were born, you’ve probably seen this poster. I have a copy in my room.
Typically whenever I encounter this picture, I just walk on by and reminisce about how great the movie is, the fairy tale ending and how everyone has a little Holly Golightly in them.
But yesterday was different.
Yesterday, I walked by this picture and saw something different. The Ray Ban wayfarers were not shaded so darkly, and you could see Hepburn’s eyes. And I stopped walking. There was something in her eyes that made me breathe in sharply – something familiar. Fear.
(Let’s dismiss the fact that Audrey Hepburn is playing a character and just think of her as Holly Golightly. )
Her eyes were wide open, but with a tilt to the eyelids that suggested that she was about to cry. I don’t know if Hepburn meant for that look to be seen in the camera. You could produce a convincing argument for either. Let’s presume for the sake of my blog post that she didn’t.
Once you see her eyes, when you see the fear, the movie as you know it sort of melts away. Holly Golightly seemed like a glamorous, slightly confused socialite who really did get scared of things like commitment and being trapped and falling in love. But at the end of the movie in the pouring rain, you see the hug, the kiss, the cat… you turn off the T.V. with the sigh that everything will be all right.
What I saw in that photo yesterday was a fear with which I’m very familiar. She looked like she was balancing the breakable pieces of her life on the tips of her fingers, and the moment she moved too suddenly everything would fall and break and be irreparable. And then I started thinking. Maybe the reason she slept with an eye mask and earplugs and her makeup on was because when she felt put together and simultaneously closed off, she thought the breakable pieces on her fingertips would balance themselves. Maybe that’s why she left Fred’s bedroom in the morning, why she wanted to marry a man who looked like he had his life together. The Brazilian had it together – he wasn’t balancing anything breakable. And Fred just wanted to take all of her breakable pieces and hold them for her.
So as the scene closes in the rain, I sitting there wondering how long she felt safe. Did she ever feel like she could stop balancing the glass shards? Does a hug fix the feeling of helplessness? Do we ever not feel like we’re about to fall apart?
What if we could come to a place where we set some of those pieces down?
Thankfully, there’s a Saviour who loves us more than anything. More than a Fred or a Brazilian. He can actually take all those pieces and balance them for us. He can even eliminate the pieces that need balancing.
And on days like the one I’m having, it’s tempting to yell at God and ask him why I still feel like everything is going to break. It’s tempting to blame God for all the things we can’t handle… which brings me back to a sermon Jeff preached a little while back, when he took paper cups and placed them on a tray. He walked around with twenty or so cups on a tray, and they all started falling. When he walked back to the pulpit, there were cups strewn all over the platform. They had floated over by the mic stands, over to the edge of the platform. And as one fell, all the others fell. If you’re thinking that you can’t lose track of one thing without losing track of everything… you’re right.
His whole point of the message was to kick off the things that don’t matter, to have a relationship with God, your spouse, and your kids as the Big Three. Nothing else is as important… and It’s so easy to just balance three cups on tray. You could dance with three cups on a tray.
So, coming full circle: the fear, as natural as it seems, doesn’t have to be there.
I may have just written this only for me. Or maybe someone else feels afraid today. If you’ve made it this far to the end of the post, I’m sure something has probably sounded familiar.
Today I’m setting down my tray and kicking off some Styrofoam cups.
“All of these things
I’ve held up in vain
No reason nor rhyme
Just the scars that remain
Of all of these things
I’m so much afraid
Scared out of my mind
By the demons I’ve made
Sweet Jesus, You’ve never ever let me go”
-Much Afraid, Jars of Clay
1 Comment
May 1, 2008 at 7:00 am
Yeah, I’m with you. As someone who likes to juggle as many things as I possibly can, that sermon really spoke to me.
There are many times I feel like I am going to break. I have no one to blame. It’s my own fault. I should simplify, but I don’t.
It’s just so hard to remove those cups from the plate.