I think we all stepped into 2021 cautiously, waiting to see if it would sink or float. Truth is, it did both — as most years do, though 2020 threatened a dire repeat. Any sort of planning was tenuous as we adjusted to new normals, knowing even those could change. I grappled with my own bundle of tensions and exhilarations last year, taking none for granted.
EXHILARATIONS of 2021
•Turning left onto Space Commerce Way and entering the Kennedy Space Center—something I’ve wanted to do since I was eight.
•Holding a microphone and exhaling part of my testimony before hundreds of women at General Council.
•Sitting alongside Mark at Drury University to share what makes Christianity simultaneously hard and easy.
•Speaking into and learning from students both virtually and in-person for James River College, Evangel University, Central Assembly Youth, and the Arizona School of Ministry.
TENSIONS of 2021
•Praying for my father-in-law as he underwent three medical operations in five days.
•Praying for my mother-in-law as she spent six days in the hospital with COVID.
•Fighting acedia and apathy, and losing some battles.
•Seeing opportunities pass me by as I over-thought or under-prepared.
A MIX OF BOTH
•Watching my job dissolve in one minute and hearing about another job offer in the next.
•Waking up to calving glaciers in one of Alaska’s national parks and then learning that the Taliban seized control in Afghanistan.
•Striving for love-covers-all viewpoints and still losing some friends to ideological differences.
•Showering expectant mothers after writing condolence cards for friends who lost their family members to COVID.
I pray your 2021 had some toe-tapping exhilaration, and I know it held more than an average year’s worth of tension. I draw solace from the fact that God works in tensions: grace and truth, faith and deeds, life and death, feasting and fasting, contemplation and action. Inconsistencies and opposites are the fabric of our existence, drawn up by the One who inhabits our tension: in very nature God, He gave it up. A righteous king, He was born into poverty and died in purported infamy. He embodied divine tension — and we are encouraged to inhabit our own as a hallmark, not a scourge of our existence. In the world but not of it. Struck down but not destroyed. Outwardly wasting, inwardly renewing.
My favorite lines about tension come from poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. His words paint a portrait of how to embrace tension as the welcome mat for God’s presence.
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life, and weaves them gratefully /
Into a single cloth —
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall /
And clears it for a different celebration /
Where the one guest is you.
-From Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, I, 17
Here’s to all that 2021 was and was not. Feel free to share some of the year’s exhilarations and tensions below; I’m right there with you.
Photo: One of the last photos I took before my phone became waterlogged and died this November: a sunset photo for the sunset of its life.