Categories: church
Tags: chaos, control, Christianity
Date: 14 May 2006 14:00:35
The following, written by our curate, appears in this month's church magazine, I read it this lunchtime and thought "welcome to my world!":
"'Worship and praise belong to you, author of all being ... You are unceasingly at work, from chaos bringing order and filling emptiness with life.' So reads our Eucharistic prayer for this season of Easter. Or so it should read. Apparently last Tuesday, I got tongue tied and unwittingly prayed, 'you are unceasingly at work, bringing chaos out of order ...' Wrong, of course, but not altogether inappropriate. There are times when what God is doing in our lives seems to overturn our usual way of being. Pattern is disrupted. And for a moment at least, it seems that chaos reigns while we try to come to terms with what is happening, what it means for us, what we should do."
I've already confessed here of my need to be in control, so this is a hard (not to mention ongoing!) lesson for me to learn. Although I'm naturally quite chaotic in some senses (one look at my bedroom and desk will confirm that!) I also find that my other natural inclination is to need to know what's going on, to understand what's happening, and I find I function much better with an underlying understanding. So when I was in nursing, it wasn't enough to do things because that's how they've always been done, but if I was given a logical reason that made sense, I'd just get on with it. I have had a few times in my Romanian lesson when my poor teacher has been trying to explain the finer points of some grammar item or other (currently various forms of personal pronouns, the bane of both our lives!) and I've simply not been able to move on, because I need to figure out why *this* form is used instead of something else in order to stand any chance at all of learning or remembering it (I really am the student from hell - I'm glad I'm not teaching me!). There are times when she has over-explained things because she's aware of this tendency of mine, and I've had to tell her to stop explaining, I understand this particular bit, and it makes sense so I don't need to question it. I'm comfortable with the logical, with the commonsense - if something's obvious to me I really don't need to endlessly question and dissect it. If it doesn't make sense though I keep going back over it, trying to make sense of it, trying to put it in some sort of form that means it makes enough sense that I can accept it and move on and stop dwelling on it. This was what I was trying to do when I had counselling, and what I'm trying to do as I start to explore "vocation" and all that that means. Sadly God isn't always as clear-cut as I'd like though, and still seems somewhat chaotic in the face of my demands for order!
Life is a bit like that at the moment (so's this ****** essay - talk about bringing chaos out of order). Things that made sense - the order if you like - have given way to things that make no sense - the chaos - and whilst I'm sure God is at the heart of it, somewhere or other, I'm struggling a bit. The magazine piece ended with this, and this is what I'm going to have to hang on to:
"Change can be unsettling, but it is a necessary part of Christian life - indeed the only possible way of life, in response to a God who is constantly doing something new*. So listen too for the other message of Easter, 'Peace be with you. Do not be afraid.' What ever God is calling us to, he will be with us - from chaos bringing order, filling emptiness with life."
* Ironically, my baptismal verse all those hundreds of years ago was Isaiah 43:19 "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland." If I'm honest I don't think I've ever perceived it, not fully (or at least, not to my satisfaction). Being a Christian can be so frustrating sometimes!