I recently finished a book titled Comedy Sex God.
The fight attendant gave me more than one concerned look as I cracked open the pages on the airplane. I’m sure she was wondering how I made it through security with a book like that. I don’t know about you, but I would typically want security to keep an eye on someone who’s reading a book that implies one is a hilarious sex deity.
After both the flight attendant and my seat mate started throwing shade, I decided to remove the cover of the book.
The author, Pete Holmes, is a comedian who grew up Evangelical and, like many of us who grew up with the Bible’s Samson and Delilah as our first exposure to romance, had some difficulty reconciling faith and sexuality. I thought the book would be mostly about comedy, some sex, very little God. But it turned out to be mostly God, some sex, little comedy. More surprising than the chapter titled “masturbator” (which I felt compelled to hide from the middle aged woman in the seat next to me), was how spiritually enlightening the book was.
You can only image my shock to discover a book on laughs really brought me a lot of perspective on life and faith.
Without spoiling the full plot, I can say that once Evangelical Pete goes through a crisis of faith after a tragedy and enters a deconstruction process. Whether you’re spiritual or not, you’ve gone through deconstruction. You find out Santa Claus isn’t real and have to decide for yourself what you believe going forward, how those former beliefs served you, and are relieved you no longer have to stay up late on Christmas waiting for a strange intruder. You likely had to deconstruct the idea of your parents as these all powerful robots- that they are real, flawed, humans who were also your age once, who were simply doing the best they could.
There’s a tiny piece of one chapter that I can’t seem to get out of my head. Pete, as he starts to reconstruct post-tragedy, realizes that the best episodes of TV or a movie are the ones full of conflict.
We don’t turn off the TV when everyone loses their head on Game of Thrones.
No, we tune in to see what happens next. When the hero is trapped or beat down, we don’t say “Oh no- fear! This isn’t going the way he/she planned. Time to check out.” No, we get on the edge of our seats and expect this person will rise to the occasion. When a character we love goes through a divorce or loses someone, we are trained to wonder what will happen next.
Yet, when life doesn’t go according to plan, when something hard or hurtful happens, we tend to tune out. We think we’ve done something wrong, that the universe is cruel and punishing us, that everything is supposed to be easy and pain free.
At least, that’s what I think.
I’ve spent so much time trying to engineer a pain-free life. I methodically plan out my days, my calendar color coded and time stamped, my brain always 1, 5, 10 steps ahead anticipating any hiccups along the way. I plan for worst case scenario to avoid it at all costs. And then, when life inevitably does throw a curve ball or, even worse, when I get rocked in the face by a fast pitch, I am distraught. Shouldn’t I have known better? Why didn’t I plan better? Why didn’t I see this coming? I’m a failure, I’m trapped here, this will last forever.
But no. These things are designed to move the character forward. Get the plot going. Spin in some action. While I can recognize, appreciate, and root for this kind of development in a good movie, I’ve viewed them as tragic setbacks in my own life.
But it turns out that good lives, like good episodes, are riddled with conflict.
I love what Pete says about his life. When he encounters these difficult situations he has started to ask himself the question, “What will Pete do next?” It’s the question we ask when we are hooked into a show and we know, we just know, this character will figure something out.
I have a front row seat to the best show in town: my life.
So now I find myself asking, “What will Hannah do next?” Where will she get the money? How will she figure this one out? Can you believe it? I can’t wait to see where this thing takes her.
Obviously I’m not going to yell, “PLOT TWIST” in the middle of an argument with my husband. Of course, I’m not going to say, “Wow, this just got good!” if we lose a client. This isn’t an unrealistic endlessly optimistic approach to life. When things are hard, they’re hard, and it’s necessary to feel and experience them.
The key is, when the time is right and we’ve acknowledge our grief, to ask how this move the story of our lives forward. To wonder, in awe, how this moment has the power to grow, transform, and inspire us as the characters to the next big scene. These conflicts, these setbacks, they are the things that good episodes are made of.
I’ve never been moved by a good story absent of challenges. I don’t know why we expect life to be any different.
The hard stuff is the good stuff. The good stuff is still the good stuff. They serve different purposes but they’re designed to add to the story of our lives, not to detract from them. These moments, each moment, thickens the plot and brings it to life. It brings us to life. I don’t know about you, but I needed to wake up to see that the very best story is playing out right in front of my eyes.
I can choose to tune out. Or I can choose to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.