Favorite plot in television? Pam and Jim will always win. I love love 🙂
The Office is excruciatingly life-paced.
And in its life-paced nature, I think the show becomes a kind of blessing to all of us who are bound in time. The pace of our complicated, messy, awkward, ridiculous, average lives is worth representing in television. Somehow, The Office does it with an almost sacred reverence it’s hard to describe.
And that really is what I mean—“sacred.” This image of Pam and Jim is almost a sacred image to me. After another day of banal nuisances under the fluorescent lights of their regional paper company office in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Pam asks Jim for one of his headphones. They stand a minute, quiet, together, and listen.
When we see this scene as viewers, they have at least three or four years left of missing each other — inside jokes during conference room meetings, karaoke at Christmas parties, dating other people, almost marrying other people, moving away, holding back, coming clean, letting go, and second chances. One afternoon, Pam is sitting in her interview telling the interviewer that she hopes Jim gets the big promotion he applied for in New York City. Just as she is saying she’s okay with how things turned out even though they never could quite get the timing right, Jim opens the door:
“Hey! Are you free for dinner tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Then, it’s a date.”
Jim closes the door again, and Pam turns back to the camera beaming. She shakes her head: “I’m sorry, what was the question?”
One of the most honest love stories of our generation. (Fight me.)
This image of them with Jim’s headphones has been up on my wall for almost 5 years now and reminds me of how blessed a thing it is to receive the gifts of life at the steady pace of time. To let the Gardener have his way in the seasons of my life. Let me be clear: I am a super bad sport about facing this truth every moment of every day. Hence, a reminder. An image like this by my desk.
The goodness of life-in-time is not something I can will myself to love. (I have tried. And revert often to trying.) The goodness of life-in-time is something I must allow to romance me: A song comes on overhead in a quiet aisle at the grocery store. I go for a walk during my work day and run into a friend. I look over in traffic to see a dog with its head out the window. I stop making sense but someone listens to me anyway. The presence of God is on offer, always. I even have a little poem about a life like this. If the Gardener’s way doesn’t win my heart, I end up back at the slot machines of whatever instant gratification offers itself instead.
One song I’ll toss to you here is this little masterpiece by AnaĂŻs Mitchell called “Real World.” I am thankful for how it has romanced me over the past few years. The “real world” isn’t such a scary place anymore when the Holy Spirit reminds me that God is with me right where things really are, not as I wish they were, or as I fear them to become.
A friend of mine recently asked why God so painstakingly teaches us patience here if we won’t need it forever—which, what a valid question! I’ve mulled it over in prayer since then. I am coming to see that I don’t think patience is a virtue we make. I think patience is a virtue we were made for. It is a way of arriving home at the life we were made to live yet have been outcasts from for so long.
I think patience is a virtue we find beside us, like Pam and Jim found each other.
In Him, In Time,
Grace