BR CHAPTER 9

I was talking to someone the other day about how easy it is for me to launch into my striving, gotta-figure-it-out, must-solve mode in life. I was bemoaning the messy middles of life that we always seem to be in – we can’t quite see the end from the beginning from where we’re standing. She said this incredibly aggressive thing back to me (in her kindest, most compassionate voice): “Well, as a person of faith, you kinda signed on for mystery.”

Shut up.

But, she’s right, you know. I find myself still trying to do the thing every human has ever done since the beginning of humanity: Reach for control. Reach for knowing.

And it just doesn’t work out. This will be a truth I have to sit in every day for the rest of my life. I am not God. I am human. My humanity comes with some extraordinary things, some God-image things. My humanity contains serious badassery. But, I am not God.

I am not the God of my own life. I am not the God of other people’s lives. This is horrible news, at first. As I wrote in this chapter, I want to be the wind. I want to be the mover. But I’m not the wind. I’m the wind-catcher. And that posture requires relinquishment, acceptance, surrender, trust.

Perfect. Because I’m sooooooooo good at all those things.

Accepting my humanity and trusting God’s Godness is walking in that messy middle, that mystery, and asking God to help me tolerate it all somehow.

I reread all of Chapter 9 this morning and I was actually struck the most, again, by the image of that daddy carrying his sleeping daughter back to the car after their caper on the beach. Her body was like liquid, poured over his shoulder. I can conjure the picture in my mind’s eye, still.

When we tend to launch into needing-answers and gotta-know, we are thrown into a kind of anxious thinking that takes us into the black and white territory where we are not present and we refuse the mystery of God. Moments like this daddy and daughter scene center us, bring us back to ourselves, to the presence of the Holy Spirit. These scenes calm us — chemically, hormonally — and they create a sliver of space inside us where we can rest a tiny bit, breathe, let God back in, let a molecule of mystery reside. Our shoulders drop. All of a sudden we aren’t as invested in our striving. And we experience a moment of letting go.

God is the God.

I am the human.

God is the God.

I am the human.

Breathe.

So, today, when I’m tempted to launch into my anxious solving and my mystery-refusals and my tired attempts at playing God, I will look for the centering scene to bring me back, to help me let go, to help me receive the breath again. Like this one . . .

ch 9 image 2

And I’ll say a small, simple prayer right now – sitting in my favorite spot in my house by the fireplace with the softest pitter patter on the bricks outside – for you to run smack dab into a daddy/daughter moment that helps you believe, yet again, in mystery.

This is what we do for each other: we reach out and grab a friend’s hand, tethering each other back to our beautiful and convoluted and unfolding life, so that we can spend another day, another hour, another minute . . . in the mystery. We spend a second or two with God, just sitting and listening, not transmitting. And we return to him and to ourselves.

I think you’re rad,

Leeana

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