Weird and Wonderful

It's that time of year for everyone: a time of transitions. Letting go and taking hold of new things, like a trapeze artist in the circus, except, in my case, far less graceful. A whirlwind of emotions from excitement, sadness in saying goodbye, apprehension and fear.

It's no wonder that we are often tempted to remain stagnant in life, to stay in our comfort zone of what we know and what we control: to be in transition is to be in a moment of vulnerability. This is a moment where mistakes are made, missteps that are sometimes comic and sometimes tragic.

Transitions are when we realize that we are in far less control of our lives than we would like to think: all of the things that we have been building, or checking off the list of things to get or to have, are so fragile. In an instant, they can be gone. We think of ourselves as building toward certain goals, building a certain identity, but in moments of change, we see how fragile the things we build really are.

What I have learned is that awe and wonder are powerful responses in such moments of uncertainty. Colin Meloy has a beautiful song about the birth of his first child, in which he is in awe of how "weird and wonderful" a new baby is. He could have written a song about how scary new babies are, or how fragile and bothersome and expensive they are. But instead, he wrote a song about simply being in awe of this fragile and precious thing.

I think it's the perfect response for any sort of new birth or new transition in life: awe. It is an act of faith to continue to move forward in life. All the evidence suggests that moving forward and transitioning to new things greatly increases your risk for getting wrinkles, for making mistakes, for getting your heart broken, for saying goodbye to people that you love. But in awe and wonder we can begin to move forward and risk this weird and beautifully fragile thing called life: because it is all passing, it is all transitioning until we reach that final destination, where awe will be the truest response for eternity.

Asking for Directions

I haven't written a blog post in a while. I tried a few times; I would begin typing, but each time ended with me saying to myself: "I've got nothing."

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows one extremely frustrating fact about me: I have a terrible sense of direction. This means that sometimes my friends and family get embarrassed and slightly panicked phone calls from me asking for directions. This might be funny until it's not: I somehow always wait until I am at my wits' end, when I have finally made so many wrong turns that I can't even admit to myself how lost I am.

And so it was that I set out to write a blog about where I find God in daily life, and like many times when I have set out to find many things -- I got a little lost.

Where was God in the frustrating situations I was finding myself in? I'm not talking about the big things we deal with in life -- I'm talking about the little, petty, annoying things. The tiny argument which we lost but we know we were so right. The small grudges we hold. The cold weather that doesn't let up. The person on the bus who talks loudly when we just want to rest.

Where is God when we keep messing up? When we know that we are just plain selfish?

If God was present in those situations, I couldn't see it. If there was something I could write about them, I kept coming up short.

But I've got a funny idea now, that maybe that's exactly when God shows up. When we realize that we come up short. When we realize that we do not have it all together. God shows up when we ask him for help. When we realize that we are people who need to ask for directions from God and from each other.

Maybe that's when we can start finding God, because we finally have the humility to start looking not just for a nice theory or a good explanation but a for a real Encounter that surprises us and frees us from our self-centeredness that leaves us lost.

And maybe at that point -- we finally can admit that we just need to buy a GPS.