February 25thGrowth in Dissonance
To my dear TFMC family,
I've been thinking about our Lent theme for the last week, and have been noticing how many places of dissonance I live in. I’ve realized how much I love resolution, how much I love things all tidied up. So any number of the started but unfinished projects at home drives me nuts. I want to get them done. When a problem arises at home or in the church, I sometimes have to restrain my impulse to just fix it. Because, as I’ve learned, it’s in the solving, it’s in the fixing where the greatest growth occurs.
Solving problems, fixing things, and figuring things out is where I’ve noticed I learn the most. While I’ll do a great deal of research trying to figure out a problem ahead of time, there usually comes a time when I say to myself, “Enough reading, time to try this out.” I usually make mistakes, no matter how much research I’ve done to try to prevent them. And this is when I start to learn.
I think the dissonance that we’re being invited to live into in Lent is an opportunity to learn about ourselves, about our relationship with God, and also with God. Take, for instance, our themes from last week. Grief and love.
Who among us has never experienced grief of some sort? We all have, in one way or another. We’ve all felt loss, maybe not loss connected with death, but loss in one form or another. Loss of job, loss of security, loss of a dream, loss of faith, just to name a couple. And in response to that loss, we grieve.
Who among us has never uttered the question, “Where is/are you God?” In moments of pain or sorrow, don’t we, like Mary and Martha, cry out to God, maybe not in vocal anguish, but perhaps in more muted tones uttered under our breath or through our clenched teeth. We question God’s presence as we feel our loss.
And, at the same time, we know that we don’t dwell in the valley of the shadow of death forever. We know that we grow through our experiences of grief and loss. As we travel through the valley of the shadow of death, we learn about ourselves, our relationship with God, and we learn more about who God is. This is a gift of faith. Where there might be voices calling us to ‘get over it already,’ God says, “I am here with you.” We are not alone in our experience of how things are vs. how we’d like them to be.
The dissonance might make you uncomfortable, antsy, frustrated, irritable, or unsure, and I would posit that's evidence of our faith growing, learning, and deepening. Where the things we expect are rubbing up against the things we’re experiencing. And if we stay with it and work through it, I believe, we will be rewarded with a richness and depth of faith that we might not otherwise have.
Yours,
Craig Janzen Neufeld, Pastor