I feel like I’m in the middle of a contradiction. I feel tension in every area of my life. My life is full and busy and my mind is constantly working, yet I feel like I don’t have time to process all that is going on in my head and in my heart.
I am learning so much as I read and write and dialogue about the problems that exist in our world today. I feel the weight of responsibility, but don’t really know how I should respond.
I want to love God and love people, but have yet to grasp or recognize what God’s calling is for me.
Some moments I feel hopeless and other times I feel inspired.
I feel like my weaknesses are slapping me in the face and I am reminded how desperately I need God.
I am overcome with doubt, when all I really want to do is hope.
I have more questions than answers.
Everything that has become normal is feeling foreign.
The process is overwhelming, but is proving to be rewarding.
I am trying to resolve my contradiction, but as Parker J. Palmer (1980) stated:
Our first need is not to release the tension, but to live the contradictions, fully and painfully aware of the poles between which our lives are stretched. As we do so, we will be plunged into paradox, at the center of which we will find transcendence and new life. Our lives will be changed. Both our beliefs and our actions will become more responsive to God’s spirit. But this will happen only as we allow ourselves to be engulfed by contradictions which God alone can resolve. With Jonah, we will be delivered. But first we will be swallowed into darkness.
Right now I’m being swallowed into darkness, but I know its not the end. As I live the contradiction, I am gaining a better understanding of what it really means to be a follower of Jesus.
Harms – check out the sermon from Bethany this past Sunday : http://churchbcc.org/category/sermon-series/ I think it’s pretty fitting for this post!
Seems a lot of how God works is through a paradox of sorts. Sounds like you are learning good things even if the journey isn’t comfy. Thanks for sharing.
Love this post, Harms!
I was just talking with a friend tonight about how this week I’ve had some of the most stressful and scary–yet exciting and hope-filled–moments. I guess that the best things in our lives are precisely that: a paradox of overwhelming beauty. Thanks for sharing.
Hey Harm! Thank you so much for your thoughtfulness–I’m so thankful I get to walk through life with you! I’ve been thinking about this a lot and wanted to share a couple quotes with you that have touched me as I’ve wrestled with some similar things. And yet, in the midst of it all, we have such Hope!!
“It costs so much to be a full human being that there are few who have the courage. To pay the price, one has to abandon altogether the search for secuirty and reach out to the risk of living with both arms…One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court darkeness and doubt as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.” (Morris L. West–Shoes of a Fisherman)
“Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in their minds, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the idea of god, not God Himself.” (Miguel de Unamuno)
Sooooooo good! Thanks for sharing this.