a middle place

There comes a point in

every project, 
every road trip,

every important conversation...

every hope prayed, 
every board game played,

every mental battle waged, 

every basketball game watched,

every video game played...

every decision considered,

every crush pursued, 

every exam studied for,

every 5K race run,

every injustice protested...

when you're too far in to walk away as though you hadn't started ... AND it's also nowhere near where you'd like to be. Not the beginning, and far from the end. A middle place. A divine discontent. We spend a fair bit of life in this awkward in-between not-yet stage, more than we'd think. It's an odd comfort to realize the discomfort can serve as a positive marker of progress.

So you keep trudging along, learning to live alongside this not-yet-but-we're-hopeful vibe. Step, by step. Things are not as they could be. But with patience, with grit, and with grace given to us in abundance, we keep moving. Castles don't get built in one day. So we grind and work and pray amidst the dust and blueprints of half-finished plans. 

The dreams remain in divine discontent.

For now.

"I won't hold back anything, and I'll walk away a fool or a king"-Billy Joel (A Matter of Trust)

"Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." -1 John 3:2

did God just open (or close) that door?

Maybe you've heard about what God does with doors.

God opens doors. Or God closes doors.

 

We walk through doors that God opens for us. We walk away from the doors that God closes to us. Sounds fairly simple, doesn't it?

 

Perhaps. But not always.

 

For most of my life, I've heard this paradigm in the context of how to discern situations and life choices. And for most of my life, this made sense to me. 

 

But then I heard a talk once that challenged my reflex thinking, and I recorded the quote and wrote it down because it rocked me that much.

 

"Christians get a little too caught up in the open door, closed door thing. They say, 'Well, I'm praying about getting married, or trying some new job, or learning some new skill, and I'm going to see if the Lord opens a door or closes a door.

 

You know, sometimes the door is open. Sometimes the door is closed. And sometimes you need to tear the door off the hinges. 

 

Sometimes you have to say, 'This is a closed door, and God isn't going to make it easy for me.' You look at all the quest stories in the Bible, time after time, God throws up one obstacle, maybe two obstacles, puts people off, makes them face some barrier, and after they face that barrier and persevere, then God gives it to them." -Dr. DD

 

This continually encourages me.  

God's plans for life seldom fit so simply into a closed door/open door paradigm.

 

As I've accrued life and experiences, I'd rarely describe God's will for my life feeling as easy as waltzing through a wide-open door. In fact, few things in life are that easy (except of course, walking through actual doors, particularly supermarket doors that open as you approach). 

 

Usually, it feels like...

-building the door frame,

-securing the frame in place for the door,

-sanding the frame,

-pulling out the splinters accrued from sanding the frame,

-finding the tools to build the door,

-finding the lumber,

-and THEN getting to work on building a door.

 

A takeaway point from this?

 

Often, what's best for life and what God desires for me will involve actual struggle, because ... it's actual life. It will take real effort, and it'll rarely be as easy as walking through an open door. It'll require more of me (and of you) than that. 

 

Give this some thought. 

Luke 11:5-13

tin roof! ... rusted

 

For most of my life, I've despised the song 'Love Shack.'

The B52's don't fit well with any music genre. It's not grunge. It's not R&B. For sure not metal. It was like if a pop song took a trip to the future, then came back and ended up on sale in some ironically boojee glam thrift clothing store in an abandoned mall.

'Love Shack' is catchy. It's ridiculous. kitschy, and altogether weird. 

And I could not stand it.

For years, I'd switch the radio station when I'd hear that snare drum start on the track. I'd leave the dance floor when it cued up at parties and weddings.

This must be said: in the great annals of time, this hardly counts as a problem. It's a blog post about a song. But you're still reading. And you have to admit, there are songs that you just can't stand listening to, simply because you just can't stand listening to them. So you know what I'm saying. You're catching this vibe.

(It's not just songs. We start out disliking something for reasons that, at first, make some sense to us. Eventually, our dislike calcifies into a settled disposition, long after we forgot why we ever felt that way in the first place.)

A little while back, I was out with friends at a birthday party. Additionally, my friends Ronna and Jim, who I hadn't seen in years, were also at this gathering (friends I sang in choir with long time ago), so I felt joyful. They volun-told me that the group was picking a song to sing together on the karaoke setup there, and I'd be joining them. No big deal, I thought.

But of all the songs, they pick...'Love Shack.' 

Of course they would pick this song. They didn't know I didn't like the song. It wasn't my birthday party, so out of respect, I kept my feelings to myself.

I feebly protested as that kitschy snare opened up the tune, but I had no time to complain; what was supposed to be MY PART of the singing was starting. So I begrudgingly sang along, alongside dear old friends, at this birthday party.

And somewhere in the 4:16 it took for that song to play that night, my disposition for this song turned from disdain to affection.

Perhaps ... it was the realization that I was slaying it on vocals ... (not afraid to say that I was). But seriously, the actual reason my heart changed was seeing my friend Ronna unreservedly pour her awesome voice through that song. Witnessing her sing like that helped change my mind. She was loving it; seeing how she loved it helped me figure out how I could love it too.

Has this ever happened to you? Surely it has. We learn to love most of what we love because we see it loved from someone else's perspective. In fact, that's probably how we learn to love anything we love -- someone showed us how.

Don't get me wrong ... I still think the song is catchy. It's ridiculous, kitschy, and altogether weird. 

And I love it.

"Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way." -Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz 

permanent solution, temporary challenge

 The first car best friend ever owned was old (old=in excess of 12 years when she purchased it for $1K), and as old cars go, it came with quirks. A particular quirk I recall pertained to this car's dashboard fuel warning light.

With most rides, if that low fuel dash light illuminates, and you have a few miles, and a few minutes, before you run out of gas. There's ample time to find fuel. For my friend's new-old car, this warning light came on about five seconds before she was officially out of gasoline, and her car would shut off. You can imagine how vigilant she adapted to become at watching her fuel gauge.

Consequently, even longer after this friend had sold this car, she remained hyper-aware of the fuel gauge. It didn't matter that she was no longer driving this first car. It did not matter that her subsequent cars didn't have this quirk. Her habit became permanent. It outlasted the temporary situation that necessitated it.

And this has me pondering. 

So many of my habits that I've adopted and fused together for living life are a guard against some very particular challenge I previously encountered. You probably do this too. The temporary challenge is long since gone, but my permanent habit remains.

Is it necessary that I double-knot my shoelaces every day?? 

Must I always be super slow to open up to new friends? 

When using paper plates, must I always stack a few together to increase the durability (ie I dropped a paper plate of food once as a kid, and thus, a permanent solution was born to never again only use one paper plate, to save myself the embarrassment). 

Must I always be so circumspect about trying new things? 

Does it serve me well to not tell people whether I'm attending an event, or what my plans are? 

Some of these solutions have served me well, and sometimes, they've held me back. There is wisdom in applying lessons learned, but also wisdom in not misapplying these lessons.

So I tripped once in junior high school because my shoes became untied, and it was in front of a lot of peers. Doesn't necessarily mean I need to double-knot, every day forever.

What do you do permanently in your everyday life that's actually because of a temporary challenge you once encountered? Does it serve you well to continue that permanent solution? 

Think on this--