The rubber hits the road

I often talk about myself and how I'm doing: with my family, with friends, and with random strangers.  I've defaulted to answering that I'm happy.  I'm honest when there are small irritations and setbacks and stress but it's generally true that I *am* happy.

Lately I've noticed that sometimes I am not happy.  Sometimes I am challenged to change.

There is no harsh, religious rule to prevent me from doing as I like.  I have a great deal of say over how things go.  But I am in an environment of great prayer and great demands.  Little by little, what I have always seen as mine, my perspective, my time, my habits and dispositions... all of these have collided with my new way of life: the spiritual perspective, spiritual time, spiritual habits and dispositions.

Like water washing away sand to expose stone, I am coming to discover features of my life I had never considered before.  In developing a richer and deeper relationship with God, I am discovering exactly where my self refuses to yield. 

It is easy to do things one likes in service of God.  But new skills, new habits, new ways of seeing the world are appearing as necessary changes and as invitations to truly become the type of person I have declared I wish to be.

A practical example, where the rubber hits the road, is using the internet.  It has been a sweet distraction to lose myself in the realms of imagination one can find there, only to emerge hours later, back into a world of connections which seem duller and less instant.  Yet it is the cultivation of these real connections that calls me.  And my self will remain underdeveloped until I learn the habit of resting in the reality of God first rather than fleeing first to escape reality's biting demands.  It's easy to think of prayer as just one more demand.

But when I actually sit down and pray... I discover that the God I love demands nothing and simply welcomes me into an embrace that is all-accepting.  I am liberated to be that which I most desire to be.  And I am renewed with the desire to engage with the real in the world.

These small examples indicate the shape of my feelings about how I'm doing.  I'm rubber hitting the road.  I'm changing and stretching and making mistakes as well as discovering crafts.  It's too simplistic to call it happy.  It's like working on a relationship or learning to live in a new country.  It's being alive. It's not without its sorrow and confusion.  But I'm grateful for the richness of meaning that unfolds from it.