Confessions of Contradictions

I'm hunting through my copy of Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle, hoping to locate some great quote or backing for a paper due soon on the relationship between Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the continuing disintegration of language in our culture, my mind stimulated but overwhelmed, and instead I run across an ear-marked page, stating:

"It is interesting to note how many artists have had physical problems to overcome, deformities, lameness, terrible loneliness....It is chastening to realize that those who have no physical flaw, who move through life in step with their peers, who are bright and beautiful, seldom become artists.  The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain."  

And so I quiet;  reminded and encouraged. Revitalized to pursue the gift of what I even fear to call such.    This pain, is useful.  This; one path of healing, a reason why, suffering the chronic affliction of humanness,  I come to this place, which both alleviates and produces so much frustration and confusion. 

This writing is not a platform.  Thank God. 

This writing is how I heal. 

Of course, here in this place, where I write to share, I come up against my own sin nature.  Berdyav says that ".. creativeness is distorted and debased by sin.  Hence the ethics of creativeness deal with the agonizing struggle of the human spirit. Creativeness needs purification, needs the purifying fire." 

So, I come here looking for fire, and sometimes I feel that heat of flame and other times, I just sit here, with all that struggle of refusal, tripping up on all the honesty required.  The honesty in admitting that like all, I am full of contradiction.  Because I want humility, but am arrogant.  I want peace but am distracted and I am enticed and tempted every day by some aspect of this world's false promises.  

So here's one confession of a contradiction:   I have a very like-hate relationship with Facebook.   I think it robs us of genuiness.  And time.  And real life.  And that it is such a great example of the shadows in the Allegory of the Cave.  And I do not want at all to cast shadows.  I want to cast the light of the one I am hidden in.  And I don't want to sacrifice the humility I so desperately need, and so I rock like an old woman in her chair, preaching against the way things are going, fearing any platform, fearing any gift, fearing any usage of what the world adopts, but, hating it all the while, I find myself keeping step with the progression.

 But if there's one thing I can do here, it's keep 'confessing'.  I can use my little 'platform' to do a one-man show on what it's really like to muddle through grace and acceptance and real life.

I can say, come see me here.  Click away from the pictures of us all smiling and read about what it's really like.  There's no perfection here. Sure, we have joy and laughter and good times but we also have pain and doubt and bad days.  We don't always smile, like those pictures show.  I'm just stumbling through life like anyone else trying to figure it all out.  But I've got God on my side and if here is one place I can shout that out, I will.