Where is the line that draws between the middle of what was and what is? The line that marks the turning of a head to glance behind or the focusing of the eyes on things at hand?

How do we keep ourselves in careful love of present and not fall to always wondering what might have been or reminiscing about what was?

Where is the wholeness and the hereness and the aliveness that drives us in these middle places between begun and finished. The place where we actually live and where we are kept moving forward one step, one shocking moment, one boring moment, another step, another surprise, at a time. A familiar cycle, but somehow still surprising. Each life made up of things that confuse, contradict, and compel examination of our own assumptions.

Sometimes life can change in an instant, but even that instant is impossible to separate from the days and months and years leading up to it, or the moments and time leading away from it. The instances becoming interwoven into a story.

At least that’s what I have to believe as I watch life continue on in an array of positive and negative impacts caused by good and bad moments alike. I have to believe it means something and leading somewhere.

I have to grasp the threads building to a bigger story. I have to grasp hope in the midst of the struggle that just keeps kicking and fighting. I have train my eyes with future-hope-vision.

How do I embrace the unrelenting brokenness of everything in this world while still being convinced of the God that loves and gives and bears all things? How do I keep firm in the hope of the God I love even when people’s structures surrounding God sometimes leave me feeling defeated? How do I rush toward freedom while bearing with the bondage of a brokenness and the gravity of earth’s structures?

I want to run to freedom. I want to live whole and free and now and not yet. I want to feel the Kingdom building and indwelling Spirit active and present, but the being of it all, the everyday living of it all, isn’t easy or immediate or even marked by one obvious path between here and there.

That freedom and wholeness and right here kingdom exists here, in the in between. Here, in the right hereness of who is beside us and what’s in front of us and what we get to do with that. The path is always harder than I think it might or should be, but it’s always closer than the grand vision I think is the epitome of freedom.

How do we bear the weight we’ve been given with the lightness of God’s promises?

How do we give the lightness of hope when in the midst of it all?

How do we have faith?

How do we hold our doubts lightly and instead train our eyes to the God of hope?

I’m not really sure, but I’m here in the thick of it too. Wondering, doubting, hoping, being sideswiped and wind-tossed and caught off guard by life as it is in this world. I wonder when things might actually calm down (as I am apt to believe they will as an ever-optimist), but than I am not quite convinced because it seems like after every storm and every quiet place there is just another storm.

But maybe the key is to find the quiet in the storm and to be held fast even in the middle of crazy life circumstances that leave you feeling worn. Maybe the thing is about God and faith and what our faith really does and doesn’t do and how it isn’t about us and what we can do in the moment but about God and how he cares for us or what he wants to do in the moment.

And maybe it’s not about that at all.

Maybe it’s about how what I feel doesn’t effect who God is. When I feel at sea or lost or loose among the dark, it doesn’t mean that God has changed or is changing or even requires anything different of me. But at the same time it’s not the rolling of the boat in the storm that wakes Jesus up it’s his disciples demanding he do something. Is God asleep, do we demand? I don’t think so, but sometimes the story leads me to that conclusion. Does God simply want us to ask?

Each little scenario leaves me with another question, but maybe it’s all beside the point.

Because somehow God is, and the world is, and there’s life. And things happen. And we live in them. And maybe the mystery of why things happen, or how to best respond in any given situation, or how to best have faith and hope when life is hard, or how to be a better human is beyond the our understanding and also beside the point. The point is God. And Jesus. And Life. And Love. But what does that even mean?

I’m back at the questions again.

Or maybe it’s just life and that’s all I can really say.

It’s just life.

But then we have God.

And He is good.

So that is good.

And that is where we rest.

Faith, hope, life, among and between, doubt, rest, God. And all the questions. And all of us. Living with all the same questions in different lives.

And we continue on.

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May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13

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I hope this found you somewhere and sparks hope or thought in your soul-life. Just know that we all struggle and doubt and try and fail, so we are never alone in any of it. And really, we should be able to talk about that. But maybe we don’t.

So what do you have to say?

 

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