I’m sure that you have noticed that life rarely lets you have one experience at a time. Just over a week ago, in one day I experienced a birth, a death, and a marriage – all of people I love and care for. It is a strange thing during the course of 24 hours to have someone enter life, someone leave this life and another begin life as a couple. It got me thinking about how life can be almost overwhelming because of the multitude of often contradictory experiences and truths we simultaneously experience. If possible we might like to slow it down so that one day we can fully enjoy a new baby. Then the next, have a whole day to grieve and feel the pain of loss. Maybe the next day, we are ready to fully celebrate a marriage.
The Kingdom is a little like this – you very rarely get to have a season of joy and victory, and then you leave that and enter a season of sorrow and defeat! Instead we tend to have both joy and sadness simultaneously; we experience victory in one area and defeat in another.
I have found one of the most helpful metaphors for understanding this tension in life are parallel train tracks. Your life runs along these 2 tracks constantly – at any moment you are full of joy and contentment – and simultaneously you can equally feel pain and disappointment. We even experience this in God’s nature – He is at the same time a God of love AND a God who judges. He is full of mercy, yet jealous for purity.
In our understanding of the Kingdom we call this experience eschatological tension. The Kingdom is here – but it is yet to come! It is now – but not yet! We struggle to live with this tension and the temptation is to break the tension and to hold only 1 truth, especially when we are considering why some are healed and some aren’t, why sometimes good things happen to “bad” people and bad things happen to “good” people, and so on. The agony and ecstasy of life. So we are tempted to break the tension and believe only 1 of the truths- either the Kingdom is here right now and everyone should be healed and happy and prosperous. Or – the Kingdom is yet to come so right now no-one will get healed and suffering is all we should expect. But both of these truths become errors without the tension of holding them both to be true at the same time.
So may God meet you between the tracks, and may you know His Presence in you and around as you move forward in life, at one moment in joy and in other in sadness. He is there in the midst of you!
Nice one Lloyd! You rock!
Thanks Lloyd – inspiring, refreshing and great perspective… have forwarded on to a friend or three!
Hi Lloyd, Interesting I should read this as a few weeks ago I had these thoughts about life and death existing in the one wedding band.
A great marriage is certainly made up of both some degree of death (to self) and ecstatic new life and discovery – this state of being is true throughout marriage with the two aspects being held in tension most of the time (as you speak of). And I guess the more balance there is in that tension state(or the more room and invitation for His Prescence) the more positive the experience at the time. Pretty cool stuff.