A New Year's Mystery

This is my first blog (ever I think) but now on my new website, so I'll keep it short and sweet.

With the start of the new year, I've been realizing that my life has always really been something of a mystery to me. Events happen in the modes of planned, surprise, desired and undesired. People emerge from the corners to become central, and vice-versa. Sometimes I understand how things fit, but most of the time I feel like a reef over which the tides of life ebb and flow, sometimes basking in the sun and at other times just underwater, waiting for the tide to change.

I'm a control person who is most of the time at the control of forces far beyond me. Sometimes I resent it, sometimes I love the adventure. Author Hartmut Rosa says life is lived at the intersection of controllability and uncontrollability, which is what makes it worth living. He calls it "resonance." He may well be onto something.*

For me, this is what defines living a life of faith--of not knowing, but knowing and trusting that Someone does. It is learning to trust that even in the darkness, I am being held. It is learning to attend to the quiet, to ponder the blank spaces, to swim the sea of emptiness between the islands of fulnesses, and to realize that there is much life there too.

My life is a mystery to me--I'm learning to live with it that way, and even, dare I say it...to love it that way.

I hope you find this new year to be a great adventure.

Blessings,

Tom

*Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World