Both Sides

While on a business trip to Boston, I flew in late and caught a shuttle from the airport to the hotel. I don't really know Boston all that well, we took a fun trip there several years ago and loved it, but I don't know the good parts from the dangerous parts, so I rode along in blissful ignorance.
When we pulled up to the front of the hotel it was nice enough, Marriott Courtyard, with a open-air mall in front. Big anchor stores like Home Depot, Old Navy, Target, and others were just out the front door. Usual hassles checking in, computer down, sent me to a room that hadn't been cleaned, re-roomed to another towards the back of the hotel. Tried to order room service, but had to go down to the restaurant to get the order (tip is getting more stingy as each inconvenience occurred) But all in all, the hotel was okay.

Settled into my room with my dinner, opened the curtains to look out over the view of South Boston and realized the back of the hotel opened out to a very rugged neighborhood. Rusting warehouses, interspersed with small, run-down frame houses, with an occasional church steeple poking above the skyline. A neighborhood where I would drive out on the rim if I had a flat.

It occurred to me that this "view" could describe our lives. We look at the front and all is clean, and pretty and accessible. We assume the rest of the world looks like this. We look at the front of other's marriages, or careers, or relationships at church or business or family and see the clean, pretty, well maintained portions of their lives. We realize this doesn't match the bifurcation of our lives, that we (unlike them) live a blend of pretty and ugly, noble and mundane, safe and hazardous
We wonder what is wrong with us that our lives are not the open air mall or the pretty hotel, but the cracked pavement and rusted chain-link fences.

So we try harder to make the ugly part look prettier than it really is. We try to convince others and maybe ourselves that we live in the fantasy world of Pollyanna (look it up young folks)
How fortunate it is to reach a point in life where we can stand in the security of the hotel room and understand that the hotel has both a Front and a Back. Somewhere in the middle, or perhaps somewhere in our understanding is the fact that one can be mugged in the parking lot in front of Old Navy, and find noble kindness in the dark and scary streets behind the hotel.
I think our spiritual lives, at their core is an attempt to understand this dichotomy. Real evil interacting with ultimate good. Good doesn't always win, but it doesn't always lose either. We carry the tension between these two worlds wherever we go. we struggle with the understanding that both are always in our midst.
Moments of true insight help me stay balanced, to see people as they really are, never always good or always bad, but struggling somewhere in between.
I feel sorry for the people who got a room at the front of the hotel, they have seen only half the world, and live in the mistaken comfort of their one-dimensional view.

Anyway, I slept great, 4 floors up, locked behind a nice, thick door. I only said I was happy for the insight, not really ready to do anything with it.

Godspeed
Don