Paradox

I am a walking paradox. AND I HATE THAT AND LOVE THAT! See, I am a paradox! It makes me crazy that at one moment I LOVE what I do and then less than three hours later I am crying about being so unfulfilled in what I do. I think I was convinced that I was either bi-polar or just crazy. Today a guy named Lenorad Sweet spent the day with the staff that I work with and he talked about the paradox of humanity.

He reminded us that the world that we live in is not only full of paradoxes but moving more and more in that direction. Such as, why is it that we are making TV's bigger and bigger, yet at the same time they are smaller and smaller. Have you noticed the cooler the TV the more thin it is? And iPods, really? The smaller they are the more space they seem to hold. The latest and greatest are always the smallest and tiniest these days.

This is me. I so desparately want to make sense of life. I want it to be all tied up nice in a little bow--in short, I am a control freak. I think if I pick an extreme then I feel better, but sometimes there just isn't a way to pick. Lenorad Sweet argued that the mystery is living in the tension that you can run hard and fast towards opposite extremes and they don't have to be oposing: ie Bigger TV's that are Smaller.

So can I live with the tension that I go in two totally different directions at the same time? I hate living in LA and then I smile huge loving living in LA when I see "george O'malley" from Grey's Anatomy while we wait for our rides at LAX. I am the jerk who doesn't return phone calls or avoids people in stores and in the same day sacrifice greatly for my friends. I love eating and being healthy and I overeat all the time. I hate the tension, I hate the opposites. Yet I am the opposite. And my extremes are opposites and some of them I am not proud of, yet it is a relief to be honest about who I am--even being imperfect.

The mystery of the tension. I am freinds with Jesus Christ. And today Lenoard reminded me that Jesus is the epitome of paradox. I am friends with an invisible God that I can't always explain yet say that I follow. He invites me into friendship and says follow me. How do you follow someone you can't see?

I stole this from Lenorad, but he said that the perfect example is a plant. It grows intensely in two directions. Deep into the darkness where it is rooted, and up towards the sky in freedom. The darkness of heading towards New Zealand is so real: the fear of unknown, the insecurities, the mourning of saying good bye to what I know versus the thrill of adventure, the feeling of acceptance, the excitement of something new.

Two opposite directions that aren't opposing...I hate it and love it all at once. Is there something to learn in this mystery? Does the mystery of Jesus and my friendship with Him collide with life? Is he in the collision? I think I have spent my whole life trying to avoid collision and I am finding that I learn more about my friend and learn how to trust him more in the collision. This is not easy, but makes me kind of want to find Him more.

Paradox....