Chasm

lent, day 2

There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

-Anne Lamott

Today, I feel like the embodiment of this quote. My Utmost for His Highest talks about being living messengers of God, that we don't just tell about God's love but that God's love is, essentially, who we are. I don't know if this necessitates brokenness, but it feels like it.

Today I feel like I'm living in the chasm between who I am and who I want to be. It's not a comfortable place to live in. The process of Becoming isn't, really, a cake walk. (Remember those? I went to one at a fair when I was a child in North Dakota. I won a Black Forest with bright red cherries on top. It was delicious.) In a cake walk, you are certain to win. You know the outcome will be delicious cake. In actively living life, you don't know the outcome for the steps you take. And so many of my steps, in retrospect, appear seriously wrong. I am proud to have taken risks and made mistakes, but I can still feel the sting of the mistake. I think God wants me to live with this uncomfortableness for a while. And so I am. I'll be thankful to move forward from here, though.

(Photo by Emi Anrakuji)