unintelligible gibberish and the juggling of bowling pins

I am walking into a wholly new space.  None of my surroundings are familiar, and I feel somewhat disoriented.  I stumble a bit, reach for the wall to steady myself, and, catching my balance, walk on.  The laws that govern this space are the same and yet entirely different.

And I'm alone here.

Maybe alone because I'm truly alone, maybe alone because fear causes me to isolate myself.  Either way I'm so very alone.

I carry with me no map, only my instincts.  I'm walking blind.  Others have walked this path before me, but their voices echo again and again down the corridor, the reverberations distorting their words into nearly unintelligible gibberish.  I want it laid out for me.  I want the answers, but it turns out the answers are not laid out neatly or cleanly.  The answers require working my way through a whole slough of confusion brought on by sin.

"We look for light, but all is darkness."

The thing is, I've been here for a while now.  It took me a while to realize where I was, or that it was different.  I was so blind for a while to the way that my baby steps in this direction were bringing me over the threshold into a new place entirely.

And now I'm here.

No turning back.  I couldn't find my way back if I tried.  And so I fumble forward.

***

Learning to love as Jesus loved is no easy task, particularly because it's not a single trajectory.  I'm constantly juggling a multiplicity of ideas like so many bowling pins, struggling to move forward in more than one area.  Juggling these things means that one or two inevitably get dropped.  I stoop down to pick them up, and try to pick up where I left off.  I never really get the rhythm down.  I get better, but never perfect.  Some things are lost.  Others I hold to much too tightly.  Focused on the mechanics of juggling, I lose sight of the bigger picture.

Once in a while, though, I keep all the bowling pins in the air long enough to catch a glimpse of the beauty of the world as God intended it to be.  It's because of those glimpses that I know God's doing something big.  He's working, my friends.  May we remember always our frailty, our dependence on God's grace, and, above all, our mandate to love God and our neighbor.  May acting on this change us and make us more like Jesus.