The Here and the Not Yet Here: How Faith Holds {My} Universe Together

I think God is the only one who really gets how something can be here, but not here yet.  Well, maybe he’s just the only one who can stay balanced within that sort of system.  Because I sure can’t.

How can you let go of the past and also perhaps even the future while living in the reminders of both?  It’s like living right beside all of these potential universes and paths and stories that never will happen or never will happen again, and worse, maybe never actually happened as you thought they did.

How can you live in a world with limitless possibilities and yet not hold your breath in hope for any of them?

How do you just live now?  Or how do you just live now without setting yourself up for failure or heartache by idly expecting the course of events to progress in a certain way?

How can you just… be?

How do people brush themselves off so easily when things don’t go as planned?  How do they jump right back in again?  Either they aren’t learning their lesson or else I don’t understand what the lesson is.  Either way, I’m not that girl.   So I’m trying to be the girl who just doesn’t hope for anything, I try to just live right now, and that doesn’t really work either.

I need that balance caused by the tension from two opposing forces, pulling the universe, it seems, perfectly taut.  To be here and to be in the future and to be mindful of the past.

I need to hold on to sanity but let go of reason.  I need to stop dreaming but go after my dreams.  I need to move forward mentally and emotionally but stay behind physically.  I need to be somewhere but nowhere near there.

This tension exists and I’m searching for the emulsifier to make everything stick and stay, when I really don’t understand how any of it works to begin with.   It really is beyond my comprehension.

…

We’re reading through Exodus right now, which has been quite helpful.  I read about the Urim and the Thummim.  Urim means light.  Thummim means perfect. Some say they were these two stones, one of them dark and the other light.  They were kept close to the high priest’s heart… physically… like inside his breastplate.  And he would use them to discern God’s will in manners which were beyond human comprehension.  Maybe they were kinda like dice.

I’ll admit, when I first read about all of that, I was kinda pissed.  I mean, here we spent several chapters talking about how the cotton pickin’ drapes and decor of the tabernacle needed to look like, to a nearly ridiculous degree of detail, and then it’s all like here are these two things that will help you make decisions based on chance.  Like why is God so concerned with the structure where he dwells but not the decisions of the people inside it?  Why so much attention to the decor of the tabernacle but not to the heart of the child within it, you know?

And I knew I had it all wrong, but given the current state of things, that’s what it felt like.

But, you know, looking into the Urim and Thummim more, it’s maybe like God was giving them an out.  A well welcomed out.

It’s so hard to make a decision about something you really can’t understand and God was giving them a way to make the decision by “chance”.  And I’m guessing it really wasn’t chance at all.  They just had to let go of what made sense and let God roll the dice.

So maybe that’s the emulsifier.  Maybe that’s what the tension is.  Maybe it is letting go of reason and holding on to faith.

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