Blogs should be reserved for people like my family and friends who have beautiful children to share with the world or lead such fascinating lives people like me are compelled to follow their latest adventures. I’m fortunate to be acquainted with published authors young and old, charismatic leaders and altogether more interesting people than I. These friends should be occupying cyberspace; and they generally have my ear when they do. They’re often the type who have something so profound to say we welcome the interruption to our obsessive news feed surfing. I make no promises in this regard. Some days I’m not so sure my thinking aloud is worth the space it occupies, whether with a friend or even in my own head!
Yet, here I write, reminded of one
secret motive for routinely withdrawing from the world into my self where I can
ignore or at least manage whatever response to life is welling up from within. If I look outward long enough I can relocate
my timeworn reason for remaining silent.
There I’m able to feel the suspicious but promising safety in remaining
alone at a distance. However, it is in this inner
field of tension where my invitation keeps reappearing. Like most meaning-filled things in life, it
comes in the way of a question: How will you allow yourself be in the world?
Somewhere along the way people I’d
love to hate and conditions I’ve tried to evade began to stake claims on my
existence that have left me feeling unworthy of being myself in community. Somehow it tends to happen under my radar,
which is terribly confusing, perhaps as confusing as my former sentence. But, there’s probably no coincidence in what unfolds
next. Whenever one becomes a passive spectator in his own life, whether by
choice or by force as some one or thing goes about destroying, he is drawn all
too close to the possibility of loosing his way of being in the world. And there an even more dreadful potential
awaits at the loss of desire to be in the world at all.
I was annoyed and deeply frustrated
when a friend once told me some of the most barren places within us are the
most fertile. This type of comment is
usually why I prefer to listen more than I speak. There are some things we’re just sure we
don’t need to hear, or so we think. Recently
my invitation to make this blog one answer to its question reappeared once again
from the same friend. Finally, in spite
of my doubt, I’m accepting the invitation…for now…I think.
Rather than looking outward and
finding reasons not to share from the most meaningful movements of my journey,
I’ve just decided to stop. Not to stop the
journey or cease looking outward altogether.
I’ve decided to at least practice the stop of fearfully keeping myself
from enjoying sources of true hope and joy as they come and go in life. I suppose it’s a start or restart more than
anything: To start accepting the invitation to be out in the world more
intently; To recreate where something was once laid to waste; To enjoy the
borrowed, communal nature of knowledge and insight from life experiences as
blessing; And to trust again in the One who is mysteriously able to awaken a
response that is uniquely mine yet still ours.
So, to whoever shares in thought and prayer with
me on occasion—May we hear the invitations extended to us along the way.
