Simplify –

What a wonderfully, terribly complex word for me.

How does one simplify anything at all when one over-thinks everything? I can barely exist at times with the great contradiction of myself. I am burdened with words upon words upon words that feel beyond me while at the same time feeling I can never fully live up to them.

This is been the great and weighty question that has dogged me my entire life – how do I stop being me? How can I become something other than what I am?

Are these the right questions? They smack of an inner deficit or at least the apparition of that deficit. A dream of an emptiness inside that doesn’t get filled.

Ecclesiastes speaks of the burden of knowledge and I agree. There is a burden…to know is to be responsible…and for most of us, the longer we live, the more we know.

How is one supposed to live with knowledge of oneself?

I feel trapped sometimes at a crossroads with Jonah beckoning me in one direction and Jeremiah calling in the other. Jonah with bags packed and two tickets to someplace far afield away, away, away while Jeremiah stands in rags weeping, broken and anointed for the nearness of God.

The most frustrating thing is that staying in the crossroads is an option.

“All the world’s a stage 
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts”

The Bard understood these things. He understood human nature in ways I think we still struggle with. The crossroads is the place of the stage and one can find a part to play – a job, a a life, to play at while the turmoil roils on the edge of things. A nice routine to keep the time passing.

How does one stand in the tension between “Be perfect therefore as your Father in Heaven is perfect” and “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast”?

It is an artificial dichotomy I have created between which I have strung a red hot tightrope that I walk. How does one exist as a fallen creature and breathe in grace? How can one not?

I have these words that spill out and they will not stop as if I have been torn open somewhere and am bleeding them. Words of grace, words of anger, words of hope and despair and along with them perhaps some poison goes and healing waits somewhere in the wings.

I long for the undarkened sky unblemished by cloud. I yearn for voices lifted in a chorus of joy unwilling to speak anything other than healing words.

And then it is gone, done and stopped up…for now.