The Fullness of Time

So what kind of year did I have? 

I had a full year. 

We are so quick to want to say that something was good or bad, a positive or a negative, a gain or a loss. We are so quick to want to quantify and qualify our lives so that we know what to make of them, or think that we know what to make of them. We will do just about anything to get out of the ambivalence of feeling the tension between the truths that sometimes, life is easy and sometimes, life is hard, and some days are better than others and other days are absolute trash. 

But this is the fullness of the human experience. At least, it is this side of the curse. 

We were created, we know, for better than this, but this is where we are, and the reality of living here is that we feel both our brokenness and our redemption all the time. That's the real tension that we're feeling, the real ambivalence we're dealing with our lives. 

Some of what we're living is the curse and some of what we're living is the Cross and some of it is the tomb and some of it has the stone rolled away. Some of it is our own rebellion; some of it is our homecoming. Some of it is trouble; some of it is grace. 

We feel the weight of the fallen world and the glory of the risen Savior all at once. 

This is what it means to be human. 

This is what it means to be trying to make sense of things. This is what it means to be doing our best and to sometimes be failing and to sometimes be flying and to sometimes not know what we're doing at all except to say that somehow, we're making it, but we don't know what that looks like. 

That's okay. 

That's what your life is supposed to look like. 

Our broken moments are the things that send us searching for something better, that keep us hoping, that drive us into the arms of God. And our good moments are the ones that keep us holding on when the world goes dark again, that keep us remembering the light, that let us live with hope and confident assurance. 

The broken moments build our faith so that we can rejoice in the goodness of God when it comes to us, and the goodness of God when it comes to us build our faith so that we can persevere through the broken moments that are coming back. 

We experience God's mercy when we need it, His grace when we are desperate for it, His goodness when it fills all the empty spaces that this world has created. When we live full lives in the world, we get to experience the fullness of God, and the fullness of God fills us and encourages us to embrace the fullness of our lives - for good or for bad or for whatever they are. 

This was a hard year. I will never forget the things that this year took from me. But it gave me some beautiful gifts, too, even in those losses, and I can't forget those, either. It's so tempting to want to say that this was the worst year that ever existed in the history of years. That is has been, as many of my friends will undoubtedly say, a year of total suckdom. 

But that's simply not true. It's simply been a year. A full year. A very full, very human, very this-side-of-the-curse year with enough of the Cross thrown in that I just might make it after all. 

A year probably very similar to the year you actually had, if you really think about it. A year like we always seem to have. 

Such is life as we know it. 

But still, we will turn the page...