PREACHING

It is not so easy, it turns out, to be created. It is not so easy to owe one’s life to a God who is not done with you yet. It is not so easy to understand the reality that we are not our own, that God was no more with us at our first breath than at this one. It is not so easy to bear the changes that come with age, not so easy to feel exiled from the people we once were and unsure of what we will become. It is not so easy to survey the wasteland places in our lives, to feel called forward when we have not yet made peace with our past. It is not so easy to know, at bedrock bottom of our brains, that our becoming is a process in which we play only a small part. It is not so easy to belong to a God who on the one hand can seem so very absent and on the other won’t leave us alone. We cry, as if with the possessed men in the Gospel stories, What do you want from me?

from “How to Be Created”