the pain and comfort of small

holiday movie season is the best.

they wait and release the year's best movies all at once...which, in my logical, practical mind is not the best of ideas...what are we to do the rest of the year?! best to spread the enjoyment out evenly...fairly...but in my childlike heart it is an extension of the extravagance of Christmas.  Call me gluttonous, but, I love it.

Yesterday it was the third and last installation of the Tolkien fantasy, The Hobbit.  Today the historical biopic The Imitation Game.  Not much in common with these two, but both poignant and wonderful and awful in their own ways.  

There is one poignancy in common though...one which I was not at all expecting...the lesson of appreciating/acknowledging the reality of our small-cog-ness in the big-wheel-world.

Bilbo and the code breakers both need reminded (or perhaps informed), that they are small pieces of a much larger puzzle...that they are not the only, and more importantly not the main, characters in their life adventures/discoveries/events...it is all so much more complex than their own experience of a thing...so much more to be taken into consideration...

I'm struck.  Not sure why.  But as I stop to consider the possibilities, one comes to mind on this day in particular.

I'm just a small cog, in a big wheel world, and I am SO VERY thankful.  In Tolkien's Hobbit, Bilbo's response to Gandalf's instruction on this topic is "Thank goodness!" which I echo emphatically.

Today was my first day off.  As of late I have felt the weight of the last year in new ways.  For lots of reasons, most of which I don't really understand completely, I need a break.  And that's really really really really hard for me to say.  Again, it's hard for lots of reasons I don't completely understand, but I know enough to know I need it.  And in the end, I know enough to know that I'm a small cog in a very big wheel world, and saying "I need a break" is my way of echoing Bilbo's "Thank goodness!"  It's my way of honoring God's sovereignty and power and control and relinquishing my own.  God d*@& it, it's hard.

It's difficult to write in this type of forum about this stage of my life.  It's hard to honor my mom's life and privacy while my life is so tightly woven with hers on a daily basis.  But this need for a break, the excruciatingly painful process of admitting that to myself and even more painfully to others, is my story, it's not my mom's...well, but that's not actually true, is it?  That's Gandalf's whole point...that's what Alan Turing and his team needed to learn before they could be of real service to their country...and it was excruciating.  It is my story, it's my pride being broken, my idols crashing down, but it's mom's story as well.  It affects her, it affects our whole household, and our community...it's our story.  Well, actually, it's HIS story. 

"Thank goodness!"

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PS - I feel like it's dishonest to stop there when as my mind carries this thought on, I realize the irony that the awful, tragic charging, sentencing, "treatment" and death of Alan Turning and thousands of other gay people in Germany and likely elsewhere as well, because of their sexuality, was and still is probably argued "legitimate" with the same reasoning...that they are "just small cogs in a big wheel of a world"...but somehow I believe that while it is wonderful that we are but small cogs, we are wonderful small cogs and the loss of/injustice done to any one of us is done to ALL of us...it's HIS story remember? we are ALL part of the picture.