Reason and Passion

I spent a good portion of my morning/afternoon looking at pictures of South Africa and reminiscing on my days spent there. So much laughter. So many tears. So many precious memories of singing songs and playing with the kids from Linawo Children’s Home. And I couldn’t help but think of how much things have changed since then - both in my life and in the lives of those I served and served with. I am not in the same place I was when I returned from that trip - physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.  

My first instinct is to want to return. If it were up to me, I would be on a plane right now, with Brad by my side. Yet I am grounded and on my way to nowhere. Instead, I am on a couch, in a room, in a house, in a town that feels like it has been my home for too long. I am ready to move on. I often ask myself (and Brad) what we are waiting for. We have both had dreams of living overseas, doing mission work and I get frustrated that it isn’t happening. But then I am reminded of the whole “being sent” thing.

It doesn’t make sense for us to leave. Brad has a job that he loves (most days). I am teaching and gaining experience and learning new things every day. We have a house. We are able to pay our bills. We are close to family and not too far from friends. So why is there this nagging feeling in my gut that keeps me from being content? And then I worry, will it ever make sense for us to leave? I want to share with you a passage I read this week that shed some light on this dilemma. It’s from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet on Reason and Passion. 

“Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite...Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; and let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.”

I guess you could say I am at war right now within myself. My passion is leading me to take charge of my life and make a change, but my reason (the little that I do possess!) is keeping me in place. It is necessary to have both and one cannot outweigh the other. I think that is where my problem lies. I am such a passionate person that I do not always stop to make sure I am within reason. Lucky for me, Brad is a very reasonable person. We are able to balance each other out in that way. However, it is often an area of miscommunication. My passion gets in the way of understanding his reason. And his reason gets in the way of understanding my passion. And so we go round and round until we are worn out. We are fighting the same battles and we are on the same side, but this difference between reason and passion feels miles apart sometimes. And yet there is hope. There is a beautiful place where they meet in the middle and everything makes sense. 

“Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows--then let your heart say in silence, ‘God rests in reason.’ And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky,--then let your heart say in awe, ‘God moves in passion.’ And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.”

Rest in reason, move in passion. Rest in reason, move in passion. Rest in reason, move in passion. Easier said than done.

My Quest for Wisdom

I am the kind of person who reads the last page or chapter of a novel before she is finished with the book. Brad hates this about me. He says that my impatience is unhealthy. And yet it remains - against my will but somehow still an entity I am unable to get away from. I get frustrated when I don’t know how things are going to turn out, or even where they are headed. So I search for answers. I search for hope that somewhere down the road the characters are happy, the conflict is resolved. I search for wisdom to make sense of the messes we make of our lives.  

I have spent a lot of time thinking since my last post, and processing things on a front porch with great friends. I have come to the conclusion that wisdom comes in the most unlikely places. I came home on Sunday evening to find a letter waiting for me (along with a few envelopes from Sallie Mae but that’s a different story!). Inside was the wisdom I had been so desperately searching for. Below are the words of a wild, wacky, and wonderful woman - my grandma, my Mimi, and in this case, my wisdom. After reading my last blog, she expressed these words:   

“God only opens doors when you persistently and prayerfully knock real loud. God’s will is that you search for what your yearnings are, what your talents are, which road to take (then another and another and another road, so find sturdy shoes and a sturdy companion - and you have one).

His will must be found by you on earth, no matter how painful the quest. The angels will sing sweetly if and when you persist, and He will rejoice that you pleased Him and, in return, His child well pleased with herself. 

The lazy spirit must be challenged daily, hourly, if not physically then mentally, ruthlessly, with time set aside for meditation and prayer - which life is -a prayer unto itself.

I think God is irritated to have you being so harsh on yourself. In life we always need periods, self chosen, of readjusting to radical, sometimes dramatic life changes. High on the readjustment chart is leaving home, marriage, new job, financial re-adjustments, leaving old friends, finding new friends, gaining weight. Finding the joy that suits you - the list goes on and on, so give life time to settle and be good to Katie.” 

And now I search for the joy that suits me. 

Time

I find time to be a paradoxical thing. It seems the less you have of it, the more you complain about wanting more. However, the more time you have, at least for me personally, the more of it you waste. I’m not talking about time that is measured by months or years. I mean time in the more transient sense - seconds, minutes, hours. This is the time that we squander.

This new “career change” has really opened up my schedule. Sometimes I have entire days with nothing on the agenda. Because of this, I find my days filled with unimportant things. It’s funny - before this schedule became my reality I was excited about all the possibilities that more time would allow me to do...things like creating art and playing music, picking up some extra hobbies, going to the gym, reading, etc. These things, however, remain on the list of things I have yet to do with all my time. Instead I find myself wasting away on the couch, consumed by facebook or the latest TV series on Netflix instant stream.

So why am I admitting these things to you? Because what it comes down to is this - at the end of the day we are all alloted the same amount of time. No more, no less. It’s what we do with the 24 hours we are given that tells us what kind of a person we are. At this point in my life, I am not the kind of person I want to be. I had all these dreams and hopes of what my life would look like after college. And don’t get me wrong, some pretty great things have happened over the past two years since graduation. But I feel like I am just sitting back watching my life go by, watching time slip away. Deep down, I know that is not the kind of person I am. 

I have spent my whole life waiting. In high school I was always waiting for college. Once I reached the milestone of graduation and finally made it to college, I found myself waiting there too. I was waiting for Christmas break, then for the next semester, then for summer break. Towards the end of summer I was always waiting and anticipating the trip back up to school. I am not alone in this. I continually hear people say that they are just ready to get out of wherever they are. Someone will passively say that they cannot wait to be out of school, or be finished with their internship, or in the real world, or back in school. We all want to move to Africa or Mumbai or Europe. Somewhere in ourselves we want to believe that if we can get out of the current context then we will finally be set free. And then we wait.

Waiting can be the death of us. It puts us in a coma of time, in which we are lethargic and unresponsive. This concept may seem harsh, but I think we even use the will of God as an excuse to not live out our lives. We say we are praying for God’s will, or that we are waiting for Him to open a door or somehow reveal to us our next steps. And then the waiting comes. But what if, instead of focusing on this ambiguous “will of God,” we focus on the fact that we were sent? This doesn’t always look like we want it to look and I think that’s where we get confused. When I think of being sent, I think of the times in my life when I was on an airplane headed to Mexico, Australia, El Salvador, South Africa, or some other physical mission field or exciting destination. But the thing is, not only are we sent to those far off places, or those mountain top experiences of faith - we are sent home too.

I am still learning what it means to be sent and where that will take me next in life. There is no formula, no clear cut answer or bullet point list. Being sent just means that we have to go and it means that we are not ready. It means that we are broken and hurting and yet, at the same time, we’re very much alive and whole. It means that you probably have this aching inside of your chest sometimes. You know the times where you feel like there is something that is just beating inside of you and you can’t figure out how to get it out? The feeling where you have a wall between you and whatever it is that you are supposed to be? To be sent anywhere, whether it is to Haiti or Cape Town or Madison, IN could simply mean that you are to remind everyone around you that this kingdom inside of us is real and it is coming.

I just started reading Francis Chan’s Forgotten God, a book about “reversing our tragic neglect of the Holy Spirit.” Something he said in the introduction really hit me and I think it speaks to this idea of time and waiting and being sent. “I refuse to live the remainder of my life where I am right now, stagnating at this point. Don’t get me wrong: God has already done so much in my life, and I am grateful for it. I’m just convinced there’s more. There’s more of the Spirit and more of God than any of us is experiencing. I want to go there--not just intellectually, but in life, with everything that I am.” 

My next task is to find out what it means to live sent here in Madison.