I was looking back through old entries just now, trying to pinpoint when I did my first blog redesign, about this time last year. Last year I was entering my last full month of college as March unwound. I could go on and on about how I was wrong and right in surprising ways about life now, and about what I know now and didn't then and all that's happened since, and all that. A general catch up reminiscence post, and maybe I'll do one of those someday, but not today, not right now, because, though I resist it as much as I can, I'm realizing a theme to my writing, and I guess, if my writing has to have a theme, I'm honored to have this one: Betweenness. Liminality. Indefiniteness symbolized by spacial uncenteredness. As college came to an end, I felt the betweenness of life's changing tide, the now and not yet of there and the rest of my life. As it turns out, circumstances change but I still feel the sharp pangs of betweenness and I'm kind of a walking example, at least in my own mindset, of the livability of the post-modern ideal. I don't know if there can be such a thing as the post-modern ideal, but if there is, it is the ability to live liminally. That's not to say it is to be tried for- it is to say that we all live liminally and are at our best when we fully acknowledge that we're between centers at all times and can't really know anything about the centers till we step back and let ourselves exist between them. And that's what I do. That's what I've been doing for at least a year, subconsciously and most definitely super-consciously at times. That's not to brag, well, maybe it is a little bit but I don't mean it to be...it's just that I've thought recently, quite a bit, that I've felt the most in-between things in life as I ever have, and reading through what I wrote last year, I wonder if that's true or if I'm simply more aware of it now than ever before (perhaps largely brought on by the forced introspection of forcing myself to average one post per day during lent save for Sundays). I do know I'm living and feeling in between many things now, but I have been for awhile.
But that's life in this world, between many things. Ultimately though, it's a direct analog to the now and not yet that is the Kingdom of God. There are parts of it here, there are elements ongoing. But they pale in comparison to what is to come, and we're constantly between those facts.
There is however, one center that is constant and our own disparateness with it is our own shortcoming. Hope in that, hope in Him, is the fuel to fire the engines of a life stuck between many things thanks to the brokenness of our suffering world. But it's not eternal, and if nothing else, that's where we can get our hope. I'm not positing the value of inbetween living, just pointing out its existence, because we're all always in between and we're all always in process and we always will be til He returns. But He loves us and will not withhold all blessings prior to that day.
Even so, right now, I'm between many things, and he wants me to be that way for the time being, and when that time is up, I'll be between other things.
Last night I went on a very impromptu stargazing trip with 4 students at the University of Findlay. My love for that particular institution and city will have to wait for another hypothetical post that may never take place. I don't know that it matters the context, but looking up at the stars, even in our attempts to objectify them as our own constellations, always makes me feel small and warm and filled with wonder, like a child in his or her mother's arms not long after birth; there's a rightness and a warmth to the smallness and the fulfillment from the experience. Somehow, gazing up, I don't feel inconsequential despite the vastness of the universe. I feel small compared to its largeness, but I feel close to it all the same, and somewhere in that lies the love that passes all understanding, because the God that made all of that still loved us enough to not just die for us, but to come here in the first place, from up there where, even if not literally heaven that is the heavens of outerspace, I'm sure the stars look more brilliant.
-Zack
"I want to know if you feel the same way, cause if you do I want to stay forever"
-Ween
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