Shadows

for when life is bittersweet

Joshua Tree California at sunset with my friend Brooke in July 2020.

In my freshman year of high school, I wrote one of my first poems. I ended it with this, “But when we taste vinegar, chocolate is ever so sweet.”

I don’t know if chocolate even tastes sweet after vinegar, I haven’t gotten to the part of testing my theory, but somehow the antithesis of sweet in my 9th-grade mind was vinegar. 

It was the first time I caught this idea of shadows. 

Everything has a shadow, the darkness cast from that which interrupts the sunshine. It’s the part we don’t like. It’s the vinegar. 

Someone once told me that the very things that might annoy me about my husband are the very same things I would love about him the most. 

After my first year of marriage, I find that to be so true. The moments where he makes me laugh at the most inopportune times might annoy me, but the laughter we have together is also part of the fullness of my life. It’s one of my favorite things about him.

You really can’t have one without the other. 

I’ve come to realize that no moment in life is completely pure. They all seem to have a shadow. Or vice versa. Every shadow has its source in sunshine somehow, somewhere.

I have fallen silent in writing the last two weeks. We moved out of our little blue house during an excessive heat warning and thunderstorm, while running a garage sale the weekend before and flying out to the Philippines for a conference the day after. 

I immediately got sick when we arrived in the Philippines after 30 hours with minimal sleep. 

It was craziness. 

I was surprised by how easily irritated I was by the hectic transition. I knew it was coming. I was excited for the Philippines, but it was still so hard. Our lifestyle requires us to be on the go, stay lean with our belongings, and live a somewhat chaotic schedule. 

But, at the very same time, it’s also the life I always wanted. It’s the life I always dreamed of. This is it. I’m living it.

The very life I love has the long days and moments where I want to quit just as much as it’s filled with the days where I’m navigating “jeepneys” through Manila, trying street food and so honored and in awe to be a part of what God is doing in the world. 

Life has its shadows. They are inextricably woven into the very fabric of life, and as much as we’d like them not to be, they’re there.

But if we let them, the bitter can help us to cherish the sweet. 

I’ll never forget one of my first times at Chic-fil-A. I had gone snowboarding for the first time and was abandoned by my friends as I tumbled down the hill for 5 hours. If you’ve ever snowboarded before you know, the first day is just brutal, but it’s also unavoidable if you want to learn. I was tired, worn down, and hungry. 

That chicken club sandwich and waffle fry will go down in the books as the best meal I’ve ever had. 

I’ve had the same meal at Chic-fil-A multiple times since, but it doesn’t quite hit the same as when I was famished coming off the ski hill. I couldn’t know what it was to be satiated without knowing hunger.

I think I’ve often sought out perfectly sweet moments, only to grow irritated or angry at the bitterness that comes afterward. 

But it is the very things I love about my life that equally cause stress, expended energy, or hardship. 

Sometimes I forget that. Sometimes I forget that shadows are fleeting and it is only in this life that I get to worship God through chaos, pain, and hardship. 

There’s a reason I love dark chocolate. There’s something about the bittersweet things of life. The sweetness that is drawn out is different, but just as desirable.

Nothing is without its shadow, that is, “until the day breathes and the shadows flee” 

And through the shadows, we cry out, “Turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young stag on cleft mountains.” (Song of Songs 2:17)

How quick He is to come to be with us in the bitter, bringing the fullness of sweet: Himself. 

The most exhilarating moments of my life have been in the experience of leaning on my Beloved when I have reached the end of myself. And when I look back, I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”- Psalm 23:4

A blurry photo of my shadow amidst some daisies on the side of the road in LA.

For the One,