I've said before that it's much harder for me to write about the resolution of a conflict than it is to write about the conflict itself. There are a lot of reasons for that. A large part of it is because that's just the way my brain works. I'm better at picking things apart than putting them together. And also, when I do resolve something, once I get there, it seems so obvious that when I write it out it sounds kind of dumb and corny. But to skip over writing out the moments of insight is to come down on the side of despair, and I don't want to do that either.

So I'm behind a bit. Because the stuff I wrote back in --I just looked, and it was November, and I can't believe it's been that long-- has worked itself out for now. As more than one wise person has noted, the spiritual path is never a straight line. It has meanders and dead ends and side steps, but it shakes out roughly into a spiral. You work your way through some difficult places, and then a few months/years/decades later you find yourself circling back to work through the same things again, but in a different place with a different perspective and a different set of experiences to feed into it. So I don't think I'm done with this. But the dissonance I was talking about in November, the dialogue going on between the part of me that believes and the part of me that doesn't, seems to have worked itself out for now. And the seeds of the resolution are in those posts, which is why it seems so obvious now. I needed to let go of my worn-out expectations of what God is like to make room for something bigger and more expansive. You might call it another round of forgiving God for not being what I expected God to be.

When I was in junior high I heard a Christian speaker talk about the meaning of commitment: giving all that you know about yourself to all that you know about God. So that as you find out more about yourself, and as you find out more about God, you have to update your commitment. I might word it a little bit differently now, but I still think about that.

That's probably not very clear, but it's the best I can do at the moment. And as always, interpret the use of the word "God" in this post to mean "what I think of as God."

AB