Why You're Still Hurting From Something You Thought You'd Moved Past

Now in the early morning hours of September the 1st, 1985, a research team in the North Atlantic saw something on a video monitor that people had been searching for for many generations.

More than 12,000 feet beneath the surface, their cameras passed over one of the boilers from the RMS Titanic.

After 73 years, the ship's resting place had finally been found.

The Titanic had never stopped existing.

It had simply remained sort of beyond the reach of ordinary sight.

And for decades, the ocean looked the same from above.

Waves moved across the surface, ships passed through the area, storms came and went.

Yet far below all that movement sat the remains of a night that had changed thousands of lives.

I keep thinking about how often people are like that.

You know, we look at someone and we see just the surface.

They show up at work and they say hello when we speak to them.

Later, they post a photograph from the weekend on their Facebook page, so we assume, well, life must be good.

Meanwhile, there may be an entire story or history resting beneath what they allow the world to see.

Pain doesn't disappear just because it's quiet.

Grief doesn't have a calendar so it knows when enough time has passed that it now has to stop.

An unfinished story doesn't become complete just because everyone else has stopped asking about it.

So today, I want to talk about what remains beneath the surface.

I want to consider the parts of our lives that may be hidden, but are still very much present.

And I want to ask what it means to approach those hidden places with patience instead of judgment.