Timing is Everything

Note: I didn’t take the time to refine my prose in this post. Please forgive its sloppiness and potential incoherency. I don’t even know whether I’m really saying anything profound here but it is certainly something that was good for me to write, for my own well-being. I look forward to your comments.

What does it really mean to say that timing is everything? How long must one wait for something to occur? I’ve been waiting for much too long now and yet something is beginning to happen. Something new. Something risky. Something completely unanticipated. For now, I will refer to it as the Factor. I do not want to disclose what that is at this time. So don’t ask. But why now? What kind of meaning is there to the sequence of events in one’s life? What is the meaning of the time in-between the soul-changing events?

Is there perhaps a space in the so-called Christian life for the unexplainable, the unpredictable, even perhaps, the “sinful”? If we are to describe the Christian life as a life that is Christian then perhaps we have neglected the “dark side” of Christianity. Why? Because that is the essence of life: the dark and the light, the good and the bad, and everything in-between. We don’t really get to choose where our path (or “destiny” if you wish) might take us. What we do get to choose is whether we will accept or deny one’s life situation and where it might take them. Do we allow our beliefs/standards to inhibit such a necessary part of the journey or do we allow them to be integrated into the larger story? Now, in many ways, this post is extremely premature, at least as far as the personal element is concerned. The Factor hasn’t really happened just yet. But it has at least given me at last the final sense that something bigger is happening and it has been all along.

For some time now, I have undergone a major transition in my life, namely my “spiritual” life. What happened is that my spiritual life, at least its interior aspect, pretty much just disappeared over the past few years. I have been going through a spiritual dark stage of sorts, taking it step by step, letting it be what it needed to be. I have tried not to avoid the natural journey into the dark. For some time now, I have for all practical purposes pushed God out of my life. And yet the entire time there has been a part of me that has known that that is precisely what I needed to do. I needed to let a part of me die, truly die, so that it could become something else, something that it needs to be. In many ways, this process led me to the conclusions concerning the church in the earlier posts. The vice versa is true as well. My thoughts concerning the church have shaped the way I interpret my life. Where I am personally is exactly where I need to be right now. It just is what it is. For those who wish to frame it in a Christian context, it could be said that “God has led me” into this dark stage.

I have experienced many things within the past year that most would consider to be very non-Christian. And in many ways, perhaps they’re right. But what’s missing from that idea is the larger concept of the story. I think this is precisely where our idea of individual, isolated “acts” of sin goes awry. It’s like the “What Would Jesus Do?” fad that was in a few years ago. It assumes that we come upon a certain situation and make a decision as to whether it’s right or wrong. But sin, in my perception, is far more contextual. We live in a sinful world. We can’t escape it. From the clothes we wear to the houses in which we reside to the country in which we live, we cannot escape sin. We must therefore make decisions as to where we will spend our energy. We have to pick and choose our battles in life because if we try to fight them all, we will lose more than we win. Take the sex discussion for example. Do we spend all our energy focusing on trying not to lust after another woman or is that energy better spent in areas that are more focused on the “other” (and not ourselves)? Do we really think God’s primary concern is our sexuality? Or our language? Or our sources of entertainment? Isn’t he perhaps more concerned about guiding us through our respective lives and thereby leading us to help others? This is why I do not concern myself with such things anymore. They're just not important in the grand scheme of things.

The main point that I wish to express here is that we should be more concerned with the journey and direction of our lives rather than its status on the scale of sin. For sometimes sin is a necessary evil that must be experienced and not just looked upon. Perhaps this is the precise meaning of the cross: sin is not to be avoided per se, but engaged. And as a result, we must accept the consequences of that engagement, wherever they might lead. And if that engagement takes months and even years, so be it. Sometimes we just have to let life be what it is. Some of it is within our control, some is not. You could lose everything at the drop of a hat and be left to pick up the pieces. And then on the flip side, you could happen upon the meaning of life by turning left instead of right. Call it what you will but in the end, timing will refuse to be anything other than everything. So give it the attention it needs...for if you don’t, you might miss something great, something beyond your imagination, something that makes life worth living...