Dichotomy

God has been using The Ragamuffin Gospel to confirm a couple of different things to me...

First: 

Last week during a church leadership meeting, we were asked to describe ourselves in one word. Immediately the word "dichotomy" leaped to my brain and I knew that it was pretty accurate. When it came to my turn to tell my adjective and reasoning for why I chose it, I explained that for the greater part of my adult life I have felt like a strange combination of extremes: 

• Sweet, yet bratty
• Introverted, yet outgoing
• Believing, yet anxious
• Passionate, yet apathetic
• Surrendered, yet selfish
• Cynical, yet compassionate
• Shy, yet bold

This has at times made me feel like I am pulled between two forces and that there will never be a happy medium resolution. But I had to laugh yesterday when I was reading and came across:

"When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer."

Does everyone feel this way at some point - that they just don't make any sense at all? Does it really matter? "But if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself" (Luke 14:11 MSG). Analyzing our intricacies has its place, I suppose......but becoming who we were meant to be is completed through resting in God and being at rest with ourselves.

 I am kind of thinking out loud as I go here....this is so scattered! Finding comfort in this as a reminder of what is really important: "He'll show us the way he works so we can live the way we're made" (Isaiah 2:3 MSG). 

Okay, phew, 

Second:

Last week I posted a blog about how I had spent too much time scouring others' personal blogs for thoughts and musings that would encourage me.....but that ultimately I had missed the point that I needed to be seeking God on my own in addition to the encouragement of others. Brennan Manning sums it up more succinctly than me (big shocker!): "We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited." 

I just thought that was cool and reminded me that God's revelations are relevant and timely! 

Signing off with the thoughts I am focusing on today: "'You are accepted. You are accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.' If that happens to us, we experience grace"

Indeed, "Say the welcoming word to God-'Jesus is my Master'-embracing, body and soul, God's work of doing in us what he did in raising Jesus from the dead. That's it. You're not 'doing' anything: you're simply calling out to God, trusting Him to do it for you. That's salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: "God has set everything right between Him and me!" (Romans 10:9-12 MSG)

I am accepted, just as I am.....and I accept God. Now to just rest in that.