Life, from my perspective, seems to be a story of getting and losing and finding and getting stung and stopping and running and hustling and losing again. It is a rotating drama as we catch the waves of goodness and grief. The best lives are those that can manage that rhythm.
My narrative is not a sob story at all. Born into privilege, my radical faith conversion in my late 20s was just a lucky break. Right place at the right time. Brightly lit neon lights. Many of our narratives have peaks and troughs and meander through various traditions, practices and philosophies. Mine is no different. The questions I ask are the same as everybody else’s: Who am I? And who is God? What is this life all about? I have been interested in things of the spirit for my whole life.
Our mostly mundane stories, complete with a mix of the divine and the human, of religion and spirituality, exhibit the longing of hearts desperate to find significance and an adult home.
The Bible tells us that what we sow must first die in order to bring forth life. John 12:24. Paul, in his message to the Corinthians, later acknowledges that this sort of thinking is considered foolish. He says that 'Jews demand signs and the Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.'
In a world looking for the serum for eternal beauty and long life, to preach denial and death is indeed foolish. But undeniably, there is a movement of loss and renewal at work in our lives. The best of us can hold this together in our minds and emotions. For others, it can never be reconciled and is a constant challenge and worry. To be alive means to surrender to the inevitability of this cadence.
God could have gifted us with an innate faith at the moment of birth, perhaps as a sixth sense, but instead, He deemed that we would have to seek it. Through Jesus, He made it much easier to make that decision, but even that's debatable.
When spotting an old boyfriend across the room at a party, there are typically two feelings: relief with a smug 'I dodged a bullet' wink or a more whimsical thought it could somehow have worked out. Similarly, reflecting on our faith journeys often brings either cringe-worthy moments, regret, a sense of loss, or memories of how better it was when I was a child or fresh in faith. Imagine taking an emotional inventory of all the people who attend a church service only once a year—perhaps Easter or Christmas. Seeing that old love or nemesis on the altar. The polygraph readings would be all over the page!
For me, it became a sense of loss. It became about reclaiming lost ground—lost love, lost innocence, lost potential. Memories of how it felt to be newly in love with Jesus were hard to reconcile with the mature and scrutinized faith of my latter years. This dissonance troubled me.
Yet, now I feel more expectant, hopeful, and perhaps, more faithful. It's been unplanned, unexpected, and possibly undeserved. I'm taking inventory and taking back some lost land.