Of all the metaphors for life, I think a watermelon gets it the best. A watermelon has both red, watery flesh and hardened, black seeds. Both are good, both are useful. The red, watery flesh can be eaten and it is sweet. Just like life, the sweetness may vary depending on how ripe the watermelon is, when it is cut and how it was grown. But no matter how sweet or tart the whole is, there are still those darn seeds. Usually, the seeds are seen as an impediment to the good stuff. You don’t eat the seeds, you don’t crack them open and find a delicious nut inside like sunflower seeds; watermelon seeds are just useless. In fact, they are so useless that most people spit them out. Wilder than that, we now have ‘seedless watermelons,’ really pain free watermelons. We see the seeds as so useless, so undesirable, so expendable that we either spit them out or discard them altogether. What a sad indictment of how we live our lives. If this is how we treat our watermelons, how much more do we avoid, spit out, and discard of the “dark spots” in our lives. We enjoy the sweet fleshy fruit and we try as hard as we can to get as much as we can out of life, but we so often see the dark spots as undesirable.
What if, we saw the potential and the power locked inside the seeds? What if the pain, the darkness, the depression, the death of our lives was the very thing that gave us life? I agree that the pain of our lives need not stay in the pit of our stomachs, pain needs to be expelled just as a watermelon seed is, but not in disgust. Expelling the pain simply means experiencing it for what it really is. When we experience our pain, we find that the darkness of those times is not an indication of death, but deep inside those nuggets of pain, life is awaiting to spring forth. The power of the seed is the power of life. When we get our pain outside of ourselves, when we experience our pain through letting out our most feared emotions: anger, sadness, loneliness, we find that therein lies life.
Just as seeds that spit onto ready soil spring up into life-filled watermelons, so pain that is felt and accepted as reality delivers life. My clearest and most present moments are right after I have experienced the deepest sadness, anger, and loneliness. Life seems crisp, like I’ve broken through a layer of ice that drops me into chilly, eye-opening water. Pain opens my eyes to reality. Recently after I experienced one of these painful moments and let out a deep sadness that was hidden within me, I walked outside and saw a bed of flowers. Without even realizing it then, I sat and gazed at those flowers for probably 20 minutes. I was so enraptured in the beauty that lay just before me. I was so slowed down to reality, to the moment, to what was. I don’t think I would have seen the depth of beauty in those flowers if I had just finished laughing at a joke or hurried past them after a shallow conversation. There is something about experiencing pain that brings life, meaning and reality.
So let’s embrace the seeds that our watermelon lives give us. Let us spit them out only for the purpose of seeing them for what they really are. And let us spit our painful moments not in undesirable disgust, but in honest and redemptive hope that when they land in the space we inhabit, those black seeds, those painful moments, will one day spring forth life. And the more painful moments I experience in the context of such a hope, the more my pain becomes a garden around me from which I can continue to live from and invite others to do the same. So, I will glory in my pain, not because it is painful, but because life awaits me.
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