looking through me

Tag: self-perception

September 7, 2014

new balance

I’m emerging from a cocooning season. It’s been a long season, and—not surprisingly—it’s a slow emergence. What I’m processing now is an insight gleaned from the safety and solitude of my cocoon: my sense of balance was skewed.

I thought in boxes. So that’s how I understood balance. I needed to arrange the boxes with the fewest gaps and the most ergonomic shape so they wouldn’t fall. It was a perpetual cross of Tetris and Jenga. Fit this here. Pull that out there. Flip and move. Don’t let it tip. Family, work, friends, church, “free” time . . . maybe God could slip in the in-between spaces that formed when I didn’t rotate and slide deftly enough.

Shockingly I was perpetually unbalanced—I wasn’t very good at my own game.

I knew “achieving balance” wasn’t God’s rhetoric. He’s big picture, holistic, not compartmentalized. But I couldn’t visualize holistic in my frenetic, scattered world, and I struggled to find solid examples within the church.

I started to dissect my understanding of balance and holism. If I threw away my boxes, if I banished the image of Tetris pieces falling willy-nilly onto Lady Justice’s scales, what did that leave? I still had all the same categories, but now they were uncontained. I had a swirling conglomeration of roles, relationships and responsibilities. I had chaos.

But what if my scale was a top? If God was the stem—the axis—and I was the body encircling the stem, then I could stay upright. Balance came not from compartmentalizing but from accurately orienting myself toward the motion of God. All facets of me could move at once in the same direction by His energy, not mine.

Truth be told, my tendency is still to lean out, to fight the pull toward God. I’m too adept at fragmentary thinking, and a fragmented top doesn’t spin very well or very long. But it’s an image that’s allowing intentionality as I un-cocoon.

It’s putting a new spin on balancing life in God instead of balancing life and God.

 

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August 18, 2014

almost whole

I was starting to pray as I turned out of the parking lot, a weary, monotone, “God, you are g—WOW!!—amazing!”

What was going to be “you are good” was derailed by a split-second glimpse of the moon sitting low on the eastern horizon. Big, yellowish, almost whole.

Almost whole? As I dismissed my tired mind’s loss of language—the moon is almost full, not whole—I realized ‘almost whole’ was more telling.

Almost whole. That’s how I feel so much of the time. Almost, but not quite, whole. But like the moon I am always whole, though sometimes part of me is hidden by the shadows of the world. And like the moon there is a pattern of waxing and waning, of wholeness and hidden-ness. More or less of me reflects the light of the Son.

It may not be as calendarized as the phases of the moon, but my seasons of nearness and farness—illuminated and veiled—follow a relatively predictable trajectory. And while I’m slowly staying longer in the light, I slip so easily into the shadows, into the almost whole . . . or scarcely a sliver.

Almost whole. I’m tired of being almost whole. The shifting luminosity of the moon is beautiful; the shadow lines across my soul are not. I want to live wholly, to dwell in the light—to be holy. I long for the day when ‘almost’ is past and ‘whole’ . . . says it all.

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