What if you fight your way through to the good and it is also terrible?

Life is so much more cruel and more beautiful than we would like to pretend. It is our culture's tradition to avow that everything works out the way we want it to, with no deviations from the plan. No surprises, except for the ones we were hoping for at the back of our minds. And it's such a lie. Life has a way of driving you to the ground gasping for air. Fate likes to strip the comfortable woolly blinders off our eyes and make us actually look at the world. 

This is a circuitous way of saying, of course, that God has other plans.

My imagination is just not able to encompass the incredible vastness of the future. It is more tender then I can think of, and more bitter. There is more sorrow, and more love, more joy and more pain. The future is unfriendly and so welcoming, uninterested in little me and decked out in banners for my arrival. There are more surprises than I can comprehend, though surprises are not always hand in hand with happiness. 

I just can't get my head around it. 

How do you prepare yourself for a child under the age of three who is on a morphine drip for eight hours a day, and yet who still gives away her candy to her friends when they visit? How do you even look in the eyes of a person who is withdrawing the contents of their entire bank account to fly across the country and take care of their best friend's daughter after the death of the best friend? What do you about people who will get up four hours before the sun to cook a meal for guests, and then drive the meal out to the guest's house when they can't make it across town for the dinner? What will make you expect a little boy who has started to say that it hurts to be picked up- in imitation of his idolized older brother who is dying of cancer? 

It's like we can only see the previews in black and white, no audio, and then the full feature is in HD, surround sound.