The Secret Life of Bees

I saw the Secret Life of Bees last week with Rosanna and Lisa and cried a good 10 times. Some movies just do that to me, it's weird. There were many great parts in the movie, but the sister, May, challenged me to think a little deeper the most. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book and plan to, you probably wont want to read further, this might just ruin it for you...

In the movie/book the sister May has a twin sister, June, who we never meet because she died. What you immediately see about May's character is how effected she still is by the death of her sister. Because she had experienced such pain in her life she is soooo sensitive to everyone elses pain- to the point that the family comes together to build a 'wailing wall' for her, like in Israel, where she could go and mourn/pray when she's overcome by pain. There are many times in the movie where she hears about or remembers something sad, starts to cry and excuses herself to 'the wall'. Now she was like REALLLLY sensitive to pain, but what if we were a little more like May?

All that to say, I think in life we handle pain one of two ways: we either harder ourselves to cope or allow it to change us and make us far more compassionate toward others. I think we're growing up in a culture that is teaching us to harden ourselves, fight for our rights, 'be strong', independent, and we're more often turning to some really crappy coping mechanisms to deal with pain: drugs, meaningless sex, alcohol abuse, porn...

Toward the end of the movie something pretty tragic happens. May couldn't handle the pain of the tragedy so she killed herself. It was a pretty sad moment in the movie but powerful and challenged me. Obviously we shouldn't all kill ourselves thinking about all the pain in the world, like May did, but what if we just died to ourselves, our own selfish ambition, just a little to make someone else's life a lot better. What if you could use the pain you've experienced and the empathy and compassion you've developed to change someone else's life? Through this movie and May's life I was reminded of the way I want to live. I NEVER want to harden myself to the point that I don't feel the pain of others with them...