the longer I live

The longer I live, the less I know.  

I've heard that line before, I guess, although I never really understood it until entirely too recently.  If only I had learned what it means to hold my beliefs with an open hand, maybe life wouldn't have been so turbulent for so long.  Of course, I still want to know things, still think I know things, and life will always be turbulent.

The longer I live, the less I know.

I want to live my life open to the possibility that God will move.  I fully expect God's moving to be unexpected and uncomfortable, and I'm painfully aware that so often I quench the Spirit with my need for rationality and control.

The longer I live, the less I know.

I've been agonizing in the past year and a half over submission of wives to their husbands and gender roles in the church and what it means to be both a Christian and a feminist.  I feel so torn between my upbringing and my logic and my emotions and my admiration of so many who practice a more traditional form of submission in marriage.  And finally I have landed.  Where have I landed?  I haven't a clue.

The longer I live, the less I know.

Literal or figurative, universal truth/command or culturally bound, selfish or selfless in motivation: the questions accumulate.  And the questions no longer matter.  I want to follow Jesus, it's that simple.

This I know:

Following Jesus is taking the quiet path, the selfless path, the sacrificial path.

Loving Jesus is forgiving again and again and again for repeat offenses.  Loving Jesus is befriending the people in my life with whom I could not have less in common.  Loving Jesus is lending a listening ear.  Loving Jesus is going uncomfortably out of my way to show deference to people who do nothing to earn it.

Loving Jesus is not spotlight, control, or power.

Loving Jesus is submitting myself again and again to my neighbor.  Loving Jesus is deference to the other and death to myself.  Loving Jesus is strength on behalf of the weary and broken.  Defending the defenseless is what I should be about.

The questions don't matter so much now.  Nowadays I just love and trust my Jesus, and that's enough.