Monday, March 8, 2010

Living a high five

Somehow, life must be lived in a side of a hill, I suspect.

Unfortunately, sometimes life is lived in the deepest of valleys and further still, sometimes life is lived on the mountain top. The hardest thing to understand, I fear, is that life even on a mountain top can be difficult. Why? You can't live there forever.

This past weekend I had a spiritual aweakening unlike any in a long, long, long time. Thirty men and women prayed for me, well, for each other, in a circle setting as part of the commissioning for the Kairos prison ministry we're undergoing later this week. (I'll be out of touch from Thursday through Sunday so if there are daily readers, come back Monday.)

The Holy Spirit, I'm convinced, visited me and convicted me of my selfishness in my ministry, of my lack of faith that things will work out, of my fears that I've made the wrong decision in terms of retiring as a journalist. I wept openly in front of strangers. I wept on the way home. I wept when I got home.

That might not seem like a mountain top to some, but it was. It removed from me, gently but strongly, my obsession with wanting to plan my future, of wanting to SEE my future, at least for a day. I was bouncing at church yesterday.

But things happen and we come down from the mountain and it is then that we must find what life is about.

If we allow the mountain top to send us crashing to the valley, what was that experience really about?

No, life is better lived as a five than as a 10 and certainly as a zero. Now, if we're lucky and we understand this, maybe it's a high five. But it's a five we shoot for. Balanced. Even temper and even keeled and even peace.

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