Living between sorrow and joy

I was talking to a friend the other day and the realization struck me regarding the choices so often we make just because we live between the “lands” of joy and sorrow. The aggravating reality is that we are stuck, really stuck in the “land in between.” Because of that reality, I make a myriad of choices about how I am going to live my life, conduct my relationships, and structure my values. For most of us, the tension of living here is often intolerable so we choose substitutes for joy — addictions of whatever variety whether they be actual substances or activities or relationships and interestingly enough sometimes we choose substitutes for sorrow (which sounds really crazy) — the way we often sabotage the good in our lives because of the conclusions we make about ourselves. No matter which way you cut it, living in this land in between and living with the reality of who we are as humans (limited and vulnerable) tempts me into a stubborn commitment to control everything and everyone to deny/distort/dilute the state or should I say the predicament, in which I find myself. There is a tension we all feel, for some philosophers like Viktor Frankl or Rollo May, they describe this tension as an existential anxiety. An anxiety associated just with the fact that I exist. I rarely identify it that way (of course… I don’t spend my days just contemplating my existence, do you?), but it is nonetheless compelling to consider. It is out of this anxiety that great acts of creativity, self-sacrifice, and profound connection with others are born. It is also out of this anxiety or tension that I find myself working overtime to determine certain outcomes to the way a situation in my life should be, and then doing whatever is necessary to make sure it happens. Then, when it doesn’t I blame God because He didn’t “come through” for me. Of course, depending on who one is, I might blame myself and just give up because “I just can’t doing anything right.” Or, if I’m on the other end of the continuum of the previous statement, I might conclude, “Everyone is against me, including God.” But, I can see the rapid vacillations between these two poles.

I think there is a secret to living that I’m just beginning to embrace — not figure out because if I figured it out then I wouldn’t need faith in God or others to walk with me. Let me take a bunny trail here to say that this “figuring it out” stuff is the stuff of which an entire lifetime can be consumed. It has within it an awful assumption that whatever I am doing or living can be figured out. It would be a little like saying that I can see an entire landscape through a keyhole! Okay, bunny trail ended. The secret to living fully, and faithfully is not working to avoid trials and tribulations — they are going to come no matter what. The secret to living is to increasingly learning to “lean into” my existence as a human, and leveraging my anxiety. Let me illustrate it this way. I remember when I went to Night Market in Chiang Mai Thailand for the first time. One of my missionary friends gave me a “heads up” about the pickpockets that roamed the market, and if you weren’t careful you would walk out the market after the night was over without your wallet. By giving me that warning, I was increasingly on my guard and vigilant about who was around me (of course being the dumb American I didn’t know “who” I was looking for), and the situations I might be heading into that would make me vulnerable to being pickpocketed. That’s what a measure of anxiety does, right? It heightens our sensitivities to “see” what’s going on around us. And, that’s what is available to us if we were to just learn to live in this tension. The problem is that we define this tension as abnormal. Yet, as you can see, this tension is the very state that plugs us into the fulness of being human and having eyes to see God on the move. Why? Because our senses are heightened to look for movement. Of course, there is one problem. In order to live in this “place” we must choose to lose some measure of our sense of control. Enter …. faith. Of course, it isn’t control over us — self-control is a good thing. It’s just the commitment to “lose” our sense of control of the world around us. Ultimately, it is out of our control. Ultimately. But, we can live in the happy delusion of “I’ve got it all under control.” Most of our journey is a journey into the truth of trust. It’s what we do with that choice that lays out the landscape for the journey that we have ahead of us. Living in the land in between is where all our decisions are made. It’s the place of incredible discovery and hope, or a place of incredible doom and despair. Gotta go… more to come!