#4 in the Mysterious God Series

How do you deal with tension in your life?  What is your reaction when some part of your world goes off the track?  Does it pull the rest of the train off with it?

For many years of my life I could tolerate little to no tension, especially in relationships.  If something started to go haywire, my whole life skidded to a halt until I could get the recalcitrant piece back in place again.  Considerable amounts of my time and emotional energy were expended to keep my fragile house of cards from collapsing.  When things in my life were bright, I could make forward progress.  But as soon as the sun darkened in any portion of it, I became nearly obsessed with restoring the light again.

God, in His mercy, began to show me that I could not go on living this way.  He had given me a desire to grow, and the sheer messiness of growth was at direct odds with my need to keep everything in a good place all the time.  So, He set me out on a healing journey.

Slowly, over a course of years I began to develop the capacity to stay on track when things were not going well.  I could be hurting in one area of my life and still push forward in another.  I could be completely blocked in an important relationship and still find joy and fulfillment in the rest of my life.  This was huge progress, but I didn’t realize at first just how significant it was.

God took me next to the issue of love.  As a young Christian, my love was sincere but very naive, as was my perspective of the Love that is God.  It was simple, sweet, and revolved around good feelings and good deeds.  In the process of my healing journey I came across some pockets of pain that I had long hidden.  I had to deal with anger at God, anger at people, and all kinds of emotions related to those events.  Then I had a very close relationship blow apart with grisly results and I was left feeling pretty raw.  Suddenly God wasn’t so one-dimensional and neither was life.

What was this about love?  God loves me while He allows my heart to be ripped open?  God loved me all those years ago when bad things were happening?  What happened to the good feelings?  What was this razor edge?

I still believed and knew to be true the things we naturally and joyfully experience with love.  But now, here, I was faced with an entirely different view of it.  It was love that caused God to send His Son to die a horrible death, it is love that causes every parent to punish their child.  Love can be the most painful thing we experience.

I pondered and wrestled a long time with God about love.  Was I willing to accept all of it, knowing that in the name of love God could cause me great difficulty and pain?  I knew I would have to accept something I couldn’t possibly fully understand.

In the midst of my pondering, I realized that I never could have even thought these things in the years before.  My worldview would not have allowed it.  I needed things to be neat and clean, understandable, predictable.  Because I could not tolerate peace and turmoil existing side by side in my life, I also could not tolerate a concept such as a Love that was both beautiful and terrible.

Our willingness to accept the reality of tension will play a crucial role in our capacity to embrace a mysterious God.  Human nature is simply not big enough to see everything at once, so there will always be things we don’t understand.  Do we have to explain away why God is blessing our socks off in one area while seeming to ignore the agony in another?  Do we ignore half of the picture because we can’t deal with the fact that both halves really are in the same frame?  So many times we make God’s nature smaller and smaller because of our need to feel settled about the way the universe is run.

I think we are inclined to prefer an “either/or”.  Either the world is evil or the world is good.  Either you become bitter or you go into denial.  Few people are willing to embrace the process it takes to come through the pain into a bigger view.  I believe that instead of “either/or” we might do better to ask God to take us on a pilgrimage to discover the “and”.  There is good and evil the world.  So, how does He do it?

Did I mention that God is mysterious?