God of the Learning Curve.

I have never been more torn than where I stand now.  I feel like so much of my past and current life experience has lead me to a point of just being stuck in the middle.  I’m stuck, in so many was, a theological abyss. I can now resolutely say that there is an in-between between a Emergent apathy and fundamental hypocrisy, because it looks like me.  I sitting on the bus stop of an endless Sunday afternoon, where the busses only come once an hour and I still can’t decide to take the 9 across Powell and up 82^nd, or to take the 19 down the city side and down Holgate.  I’m stuck. 

I’m sitting in a coffee shop rocking Billy Holiday and alike.  I’m drinking coffee, pounding 1.1 miles of pavement twice a day to one of the most secular inner cities in the U.S. To drink a cup of education I have worked my hands to the bone just to taste.  I wrote a paper in favor of legalized same-sex marriage, then defended deontology in a philosophy class—single handedly mind you!  I made friends with a lesbian, and critiqued Tony the beat-poet.

I’m in the middle, because at this finite point in life, I’m too liberal for a conservative, and too conservative for a liberal.  I’m to “wishy-washy” for a fundamentalist, and far too full of conviction for comfort.  I am stretched and tried and tying.

In a lot of ways God and I haven’t been “okay” in years.  I’m drinking through a fire-hose and in awe of the silence in my life.  The days dawning, the suns setting, the city in beat that I pound on ward.  The notes I keep dating further and further into the New Year—now an old year.  Life is passing, and I don’t know what is happening.  I’m numb and yet sensitive to everything, desperate to start saying whatever it is that I feel for the undefined 'it.'

I’m waiting.  Waiting the discipline, waiting the action, waiting the scream—cry—laughter. I am waiting.

And He is moving.

He is excited.  He is in the waiting, the building, the tension of earth like a tectonic plate He is waiting. Waiting like an earth quake, which is anything but motionless, He is building.  He is screaming.  He is laughing.  He is crying.

Christianity was built in the gap.  We do Christianity when we live while dead. It is the life we have until life in death.  Christianity was breed for the in-between.  We are not well in the comfortable ivory towers—we are lighthouses, castles of storms not sunny days of sheltered understanding.  We are a religion of care, of threat and rocky shores, not the calm harbor of fad relativity, of fundamental truths ignorance’s that get easier and easier to swallow.  We are at our best when the waves are too big to see the rocks of our foundations, too busy to brew tea and merely watch the sunset, too tired to sit down.  We are illuminated in storms and useless in pleasant weather.

And in all of this demand and daring is apathy, and summer days in coffee shops, and Saturdays spent sleeping in and making pancakes

and it’s ok

and its good

and it’s God