The more of this life I walk with the Lord and the more I learn about the world from a scientific and creative liberal arts education, the more familiar and comfortable I become with the middle of the road—the grey areas, the in-betweens, the balances, the tensions, the ever-shifting dance to maintain equilibrium. We see this in all sorts of areas of life, many including the metaphors I just used. Physics shows a balance needed to maintain molecular and physical order. Biology shows a balance needed to maintain life—systems of enough of X but not so much that it suffocates Y. In my walk with the Lord and developing the life He’s desired for me all along, this is true, too.
This is why I think it’s easy to think the Bible contradicts itself—and sometimes, I’ll still hold that it does. But I also think it’s a book sufficiently complicated for our own complicated world. If God Himself shows us a glimmer of His own tensions between accountability and grace, discipline and forgiveness, restraint and freedom, hurt and love, et cetera, what makes us think that we aren’t called to live in that same tension? What makes us think that the Bible doesn’t also strive to communicate the duality or pluralistic approach necessary to live life as we God so desires for us? (This is why I really dislike Proverbs—there’s lots of these quippy remarks and one-liners that seem wise…for certain situations…and then there are others giving the opposite advice…equally quippy, and equally limited…)
This conceit is surely exhausted in this post, but indulge me in this if you will. When I picture how God wants us to respond to the world around us, I imagine us on a tightrope, needing to balance a pole with two related but seemingly contradictory concepts, one at each end of the pole. We may start out balanced, each concept in equilibrium with the other. But as the situation around us unfolds, our tightrope is shaken, and we may need lean more heavily to one concept than the other in that split second; and in the very next second, we may need to shift to the other one, never fully committing to either, but still relying on both. We do this dance, this juggle, over and over, relying on the one needed in that moment to maintain balance as appropriate to the situational rope we’ve find ourselves on, until we get to the other side of the rope. On and on we go for the rest of our lives, on many different ropes, through many different situations, getting us to many different locations, utilizing many different concepts. All throughout our lives, we are seeking to strike a balance.
Maybe this is one of the things God meant when He told us “narrow is the way.”1 It’s narrow-like-a-tightrope narrow, like-the-eye-of-the-needle narrow.
Let’s expand some of the situations we find this balance difficult. How do I exercise wisdom and still love and forgive those who have hurt me? How do I maintain a humble heart and still honestly assess, utilize, and share the gifts God’s given me? How do I avoid self-righteousness, judgement, and disengagement when interacting with people I want to love but who often engage in things I can’t follow, like gossip, foul or coarse language, falsely invoking the Lord’s name, manipulating the Lord’s words, feeding into hate against my neighbor, drugs, pre-marital or extra-marital sex, et cetera? How do I love and prioritize my work, my family, my passions, my responsibilities, and keep God at the forefront above all of those things? How do I live present and invested in this life, but live more so invested in the life after? How do I create spaces where there is love and forgiveness for everyone, but also create a space where we hold each other accountable, correct each other in love, and ensure mutual respect and safety? How do we create spaces like that with fallen, sinful, harmful, and sometimes unrepentant and hypocritical people who can be hard to love, forgive, or respect? How do I honor tradition, structure, discipline, and liturgy—things I need—while also allowing room for spontaneity, growth, progress, creativity, freedom—things I also need? How do we live lives that give space and honor the profound joy and soul-shifting sorrow we experience and need?
It takes a lot of shifting, a lot of blending, a lot of stretching, and a lot of grace. Again, I don’t think we’ll ever get it, but we have to try. I think when we stand before God and give Him an account of our lives,2 He’ll have more grace for our failures if we gave our best effort.
I’m starting to think this is by God’s design (as I am with most things). Constantly moving around keeps us aware, dependent on God, humble, learning, and growing. I think it feeds virtues like forgiveness, grace, empathy, gentleness, among others. I will spend the whole rest of my life trying to be more and more like Christ—so at what point should my efforts begin to look like stillness, comfort, or complacency with my progress? Of course, I don’t mean we should always feel wretched or guiltily, self-loathingly insufficient, nor do I think it’s wrong to admire the progress we have made. What I mean is, we should always be striving for more, knowing we will not reach completion until we’re face to face with the Lord. We are not running from ourselves—we are running to our Creator.
Unfortunately, I think we’ve gotten in the habit of utilizing black-and-white, mutually-exclusive, absolutist types of thought. We like categorizing, defining, and boxing up the life around us. We like doing this to God, too. I don’t think that’s what we’re meant to do, though. If we can learn to be comfortable in the grey in-betweens, we’ll be less likely to cling to any frameworks or ideas or circumstances besides God, meaning we can be open-armed and open-minded to the novelty and truth present in each and every nook and cranny of this life. Maybe that’s part of what it means to have the kind of life Jesus promises: having a full life, life abundantly.3 Maybe Jesus didn’t just mean “having the Good Life,” but having life in the entirety of what God created its capacities to be—the yin and the yang, and the little grey mess we get when we mix them, so to speak. The fullness of life.
Matthew 7:13-14. “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
2 Corinthians 5:9-10. “So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.”
John 10:10. I compared the ESV and NIV translations to get the phrases “and have [life] abundantly” and “and have [life] to the full.”