Excerpt from a letter:
From where I stand I can see two worlds to live in, from the other each looks completely insane and a trap to the people inside.
There is a world where you make your own fortune. You work for success and seek your own happiness. Love is a wonderful, exciting and sometimes scary feeling and life is the most precious thing you possess. Some people believe in a higher power, this presence controls for them the very few things they can’t, this cosmic Santa clause listens to their prayers and judges them naughty or nice before gifting them accordingly. Most people, however, ultimately believe in themselves, they believe that with some luck they can shape their own destiny into whatever they want it to be. That they can conquer the obstacles in their life with perseverance and smarts.
There is another side
There is a world in which to live you must reckon yourself dead. Everyday you endeavor to choose not what you want but what the Lord wants, no matter how illogical, or uncomfortable it may seem to you at the time. Love is a choice of action and lifestyle we are called to live out regardless of how we feel about who or what we are loving. Your life is a tool of the Lord God and you give it to Him new each day as a living sacrifice. Some people work regular jobs and go to regular movies and enjoy regular music they live in the world but remember they don’t belong to it, they belong to God. Most people, however, ultimately abandon more and more of the “ordinary world” as the realize how unsatisfying it has become to them. They have been given the opportunity to be a part of something bigger, something eternal. They realize that no amount of their own strength, smarts or perseverance is going to win their life or salvation for them, but that both were given as a gift by God and that the most satisfying use of both is to use them for Him.
Neither seems attractive to someone living in the other. The other way of living is incomprehensible to someone coming from the other side, it just doesn’t make sense as something anyone would want to do. I use to live on the other side and for me it was a lot of work, it was a lot of trying for no reason, it left me tired, wrecked and unhappy, I couldn’t believe that was all there was to life. I didn’t get where I am overnight, I took a leap of faith and was caught and carried to the other side (not unruffled) by the God I hoped would catch me.
Life can’t be lived at the edge of the great abyss, it’s a jumping off place. We could stand at the edges trying to build a bridge, calling the others over to our side in growing frustration, and while that MAY be enough it would never be all that could have been. I have become better than I was, stronger, braver, happier, more real, more loving, more free. I have seen miracles and felt moments of sheer awe and ecstasy that I couldn’t explain if I had a million words to do it with. I’m in an undiscovered country and I want to explore and live in it whatever that means. We cannot ask others to cross over because it is a choice we each have to make on our own. I understand why most won’t take this on, I don’t hold it against them, they’re right, this is not their lifestyle this is not who they are and not what they bargained for, but it is who I am.
