.: avoiding the errors :.

Why am I so susceptible to people, pastors, professors, that offer such neatly packaged systems of life? Answer: I want life to be simple and manageable and predictable... at least at some level. It just seems that time and time again, I hear someone relate to how we ought to live as human beings, as Christians, as (fill in the blank), and what they are saying seems to make such perfect sense of the chaos that I find myself in daily. And I draw a line in the sand and proclaim, "Yes, this is the way that we were meant to live!". And then somewhere along the way, I somehow manage to come to my senses and realize in some way that this system has missed something. This particular way of managing life and love and relationships and personal elements has left something out. Or even worse, it bears some sort of fatal flaw. And sadly enough, another person comes along just in the nick of time to offer a new system for the old one that I just scraped.

The reality that I am just waking to is that I have paid the price repeatedly for pushing all I am in on one way of "doing it"... doing life itself. Like clockwork, that way of micromanaging the dynamics that I struggle with falls miserably short, it blows up in my face, and the pieces I hold in my hands mirror the shame and embarrassment that have become such common companions in my journey towards fuller life. I want so deeply to break free from all these things, but I am slowly but surely discovering that what exists at the core of my very nature is the demand to find a way to escape pain and frustration and such costly errors of language and motion. I get so frustrated with myself for ever having believed those people that I once trusted and esteemed... and frustrated that I fell for it. As the days and years go by, seemingly at a pace that has slipped through my controlling hands, I am finding that the voices that I willfully choose to embrace are fewer and fewer. You can only be conned so many times before you grow to trust only yourself and a select few, who in all reality you have very little reason to make excuse for, but you seemingly do so anyways.

The beauty of this life (only in the sense that I am choosing to now see it as such) is that even as I write these words, they are most likely coming from my freshest system, which (thankfully) bears a shelf life that is shorter than the ones previous. Yes, once again, I will wake up all over again and reject the whole thing somewhere down the road! Nevertheless, there is life out there to discover... or better yet to happen upon and be caught off guard by. And something says at a life beyond reason that it looks like a life that simply, restfully, continually, remains in a person rather than a defined position. But all along the way, I am seeing myself to be a person who will attempt various shortcuts to reaching my destination apart from any degree of straining and hurting and backtracking. Yes, I will end up there, ultimately by means beyond my human limits. And hopefully I will take hold of the grace that awaits me in each new rejection of the past. For in that lies the source of a life that lies beyond all contemporary patterns of attempted perfection.