This week at youth group, two of our youth got in a fight. One black eye, one suspended kid, two hard conversations, and about 53 calls to parents by Mario later, I find myself here. Over the last several months, i have often been too busy to have friends, to care about people, to love anyone. living in dissonance between my calling to holiness and my selfish ambition, I find myself cut off, disconnected and depressed, living in boxes that stand removed from one another. For the fighting youths inside of me, this is phone call number 54, hard conversation numbers 3 and 4, and maybe black eye number 2. But this time, the black eye isn't from myself. Its from the wall I've run into and am beginning to climb over.
We live in such isolation from one another, such distinction in our lives of schedules and boxes on pieces of paper. Clocks rule us, not the sun. Furthermore, and more deeply, we feel we can put our lives and our problems into order, into their place and then solve those problems and make them all go away. For example, "If only I didn't have to deal with all of my friends, I would have time for my girl/boyfriend" or my classes or my work or my church or whatever. These can be flipped and switched around into an infinite number of orders with an infinite number of different nouns placed into this same basic formula. "If only I didn't have to deal with _____, I would have enough time for ______, which is what I really care about." But life is this balancing, this juggling and tensing in so many different directions. It is living with who we are, not disconnected from our feelings and true selves so that we can still function successfully. Who we are is busy and full. It needs learning and growing; it needs reflection and rest; it needs struggle and testing. Removing ourselves from some part of our life--any part--cuts us down and makes us depressed. It disconnects us from ourselves and the work that we do. To do so divorces our labor and our product, our action and our bodies, our speech and our mouth.
And this, my friends, is not good. It means that any proficiency for real relationship is hampered. We are cut short because we are cut off from ourselves so that we become objective to ourselves. We lose even our own self as subject. When this happens, our self-subjectivity is threatened because (and this is a very important because) we have disembodied ourselves from ourselves, leaving ourselves to be manipulated and defined by external factors that are not us and do not bring us back to who we are (usually in the name of letting us express/be ourselves!).
It is not that we are to cut off our friends in order to get our homework right. We cannot ignore our housemates or ministries because we need to spend time with our girlfriends.
We live in the ebb and flow. Some weeks hold one thing in better focus, and some days others. That's the tense, hard motion of it all. That's learning to live in the balance. That's living with all of this good before us. Breathe and know that the gaps will be filled up, so long as you trust.
The only gap that will always last is the one created by a lack of faith.
This is living whole, living in a way that sees all that is happening, all that lies before and seeks to hold loosely each of these people, activities, in a way that is excited and restful. Be Whole.
