Rich & Difficult

Learning.

A lot.

Often.

Always.

Or else.

There’s a couple reasons for this post, sure one of them is grad-school - it’s nuts-o - the other is JtW, it’s going swimmingly and we’re all expecting God to do massive things, O and my personal life is just full of change. Yet still more, or rather in each of these, I’m learning.

"Rich and difficult."

That’s how I’ve been describing life to folks who ask how it’s going. Rich and difficult.

Rich because everything is new and different and – for now – beautiful, I hope that never changes, the striking reality of the real. I hope it always hits me new from week-to-week and night-to-night and morning-to-morning, that it’s all so much goodness I can’t stand it. Literally, I can’t stand it, it’s all I can do to kneel let alone stand.

Difficult because I’ve never worked this hard in my life for anything let alone three different things all at once. Yet I’m not doing the work - the bystander is being worked on again – still. Reading and writing and presenting, classes have never demanded more. Work is on the brink of God-only-knows, the scariness of the unknown is right there, right in our faces. Personal stuff is something of a strange covalence of tragedy and fairy tale (no movie can touch the living reality). It’s difficult.

Life is paradox.

There’ll come a time when I’ll be older (further away than tomorrow) and remember the late nights and early mornings, the books and the faces, the stretching and the resting, and by the grace of God thank God for giving me richness and difficulties.