Character – Faith

“You cannot escape from yourself; for G-d has singled you out.”

-        Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 This Divine intersection of G-d’s choice and our life creates a disruption, a dissonance in our souls.  It speaks to us of a life we do not yet know but desperately crave even if we do not have a language to articulate it.  The problem is, is that though we cannot escape from ourselves, we can leave this conversation G-d provokes within us.  We can remove the tension points in our lives, in our morality that would act as a cacophony of voices ushering us into a life where we dream awake.  It is here we lose faith… It is here, we find a similar pattern that can be retraced through the annals of human history to its origin, the divergent point that re-set the trajectory of all humanity – Adam & Eve in the garden. 

I come back to this point because we see it as the introduction of sin into the human story.  This past Sunday, Josh and JR made me think of it and I began to think of my understanding of sin.  If I were to ask you, “What is sin?” you would probably respond somehow working the phrase, “missing the mark,” into your answer.  To some degree you may be right but I want to challenge you to think of sin differently – to not think of it as the difference between right and wrong but as a matter of degrees and ultimately as unrealized potential.

You see, G-d exists in the perfect form – fully actualized potential.  He created us as an unblemished living reflection of this perfect form but we’ve deviated, causing a gap between who we are and who we were meant to be.  So no matter how good your life is, no matter how many good choices you’ve made, the result is still a life of unrealized potential.  And this space between who we are and who we were meant to be, this unrealized potential, is the embodiment of all sin in our life.  So every decision we make that moves us further from our original state as an unblemished living reflection of the perfect form is sin.  But every step we take towards who G-d calls us to be is faith.

There is an internal narrative that testifies to the truth of these statements.  In all people, at some point, there is a dissonance in our souls that speaks to us.  It tells us of a life that we do not yet know but were meant to have – that we were meant to pursue.  That there is more to life than this moment or this accomplishment because they are finite and fleeting, never bringing us back to our original state as an unblemished living reflection of the Perfect Form.  Never giving us life that lasts.  Never filling that space between who we are and who we were meant to be.  Never fully realizing all potential in our life.  And so without G-d, if left in this state we will either be enslaved to the pursuit of a perfection that can never be because we cannot reclaim lost moments or we acquiesce into a life that fades into the backdrop of the human story, relegating itself to a mere existence but without life.  This is why we need faith.  This is why we need a Messiah that can reconcile all our past moments with our current moments and our future moments in a single expression that releases us from all unrealized potential so we might again, be as though we were in the garden – living as the unblemished reflection of the Perfect Form.

So in those quiet moments in your life, when you can actually hear your soul, think about this…

Maybe that dissonance that plays in your soul is the chord that G-d strikes as He begins to speak to you.  Maybe it is like a blue note in music that doesn’t seem to fit but with the right progression adds texture and flavor.  So maybe that dissonance remains uncomfortable until we meet with G-d and begin to live the life we were meant to live.  And when we do embrace that life, that life is actually like the harmony for the note G-d struck in your soul which then moves from a place of dissonance to resonance.  It becomes the rhythm that creates the backdrop for the melody of your life, driving you to create a beautiful piece of art, a beautiful song that you will call your legacy.  With every note it drives you to the next, with every step of faith it leads you to the next.  It is here that G-d moves your life into the space He created for you in this beautiful symphony of the universe.  It is the play of the Divine. It is a life of faith… it is a life of movement.

What would the world look like if we all lived a life faith?  A life of movement?