(Which I do my best to prevent, avoid, or - when those prove impossible - ignore)
Is that I can't think of it as a failure or a fault anymore.
It's a feature, not a bug.
Nature testifies:
Breaking open is the only way to go on living.
Pascal has been saving the seeds from his apples and putting them in plastic baggies, wrapped in a damp paper towel, to sprout.
Yesterday he opened one that had been lying in the sun, and eight hard little black seeds popped out. They remained unchanged from the day he put them in. But one - one was split and cracked wide open, and a sprout was stretching out of it.
I know that the cracking and sprouting can't have felt comfortable. It hurts to split, it hurts to spill your guts, it hurts to reach beyond yourself into the glaring sunshine instead of staying safe, kerneled inside the walls that have always been.
It hurts to dare.
But.
The other eight little seeds will, safe and comfortable, never become trees. They will never crack and split and spill in the raw sunshine or be plunged into the dark, close earth. They will never burst out of soil and stretch skyward. They will never bear leaves or lose them. They will never stand in the stark cold with snowflakes on their branches. They will never blossom and produce fruit, a hundred times over, full of seed. They will never fulfill their potential.
(Unless a seed dies it abides alone)
And yet,
And yet, I spend so much time begging God not to let me crack open. Not to make me endure raw vulnerability. Not to make me suffer, or be still, or seen.
But this is a feature, not a bug. Cracking open is the road to fullness. Splitting wide and spilling out is how we become. It's how we fill the earth.
(And for Christians, it's not a surprise, really.
Jesus said, Follow Me.
And then he died and was buried and rose again. It's always been the way.)
This is how we follow. Being brave enough to endure the splitting open, the vulnerability, the living that - at first, to a heart full of fear - feels like dying. Letting new sap run in new veins. Reaching for the sun and rooting deep into the soil.
This isn't easy for me.
I have a strong give-uppy side.
Dying to just die, and not have to try any longer ,is my temptation.
But dying and living more abundantly, more fully - that's the feature. That's the feature.
Full living isn't achieved by staying safe, or remaining unchanged. But enduring the ache and pain of dying to comfort and safety; refusing to worship at the altar of The Way Things Are; being hurt and still daring to sprout with the strange new life that looks so wildly different from the seed -
This is living.
