whole

a few friends and i went to see the movie “transamerica” a little over a week ago, and i am still processing all that i took in. here is a synopsis of the movie.

“bree is a perfectly adjusted conservative transsexual woman. born stanley, a genetic male, she’s about to take the final step to becoming the woman stanley always wanted to be – until she finds out that she is the parent of a long-lost seventeen year-old son, toby. toby is a drug-addled hustler living on the streets of new york city, dreaming of meeting the father he never knew. afraid to tell the rebellious teenager the truth, bree embarks on a journey with him that will challenge and change both their lives and bring them closer to the truth of their connection.”

needless to say that the movie was deep – filled with a variety of scenarios and situations that i can’t even imagine having to deal with. and i found myself walking away with a variety of thoughts, questions, and emotions.

in just two hours, i had been exposed to the following.

a man living his life as a woman
a man preparing to become a woman (surgically)
a man struggling to find happiness
a man dealing with the surprise of being a parent
a man rejected by his family for choices he had made
a man trying to hide the truth
a man ashamed of himself
a man looking for acceptance
a man trying to do the right thing as a father

a boy living his life as a hustler (prostitute)
a boy trying to escape reality by using drugs
a boy using sex as a means of finding value
a boy looking for acceptance
a boy seeking a father
a boy struggling with right versus wrong
a boy searching for happiness
a boy desiring more

so, here were some of my initial thoughts. why would stanley want to change his genetic makeup? why would toby sell his body and allow himself to be used by others? what experiences had each of these guys gone through or been exposed to (over the course of their lives) that had led them to the present? why couldn’t stanley and toby find worth in who they already were and who they were created to be? their choices seemed so drastic. what were they doing? they seemed so different than me. or were they?

you see, stanley and toby were broken. and they were looking for ways to fill those broken areas of their lives. and guess what? i do the exact same thing. aren’t we all broken? and aren’t we all guilty of wanting to change who we really are, because we aren’t happy? we think that we are capable of fixing the problem, but we’re not. we get confused and seem to focus on changing the wrong things. the solution is not to change who we are. the solution is to recognize and change who we are not. we need to embrace who we are and then eliminate those things that have found their way into our lives and corrupted us into becoming men and women that we were never intended to be. we need to get back to living the lives that we were created for.

we struggle with this because we are all broken. we’ve all been broken. and we will all be broken in the future. why? because we live in a broken world. what we really want is to feel whole. that’s what stanley wanted. that’s what toby wanted. they wanted to feel whole. stanley thought that life as a woman would make him feel whole. toby thought that love would make him feel whole. but changing who we are will not make us feel whole. it will simply make us feel like someone else who is still broken.

so, what do we do? what do i do? well, i think it starts with acceptance – accepting who we are, right now. we are broken. we are hurting. we are confused. we are wanting. we are seeking. and then we need to be willing to admit that we can’t fix those things on our own. we aren’t capable. we get too distracted. we spend too much time looking at others (and what they have), instead of looking within and identifying what it is that we really need. the good news is that our creator knows what we need. and if we let him, he can “fix” us. he can “fill” us. he can make us feel whole. and he does this by showing us how to love ourselves for who we really are.

i want to feel whole. but it goes beyond me. i want the stanleys and tobys of this world to feel whole too.