Greg Garrett’s sermon has lingered in my mind and soul all week. As a parent, I’m never really certain what, if anything, my child sitting next to me is absorbing. In Greg’s closing, he reminded us that we don’t have to be so afraid. Without missing a beat, my Jimmie leaned in and responded, “Are you sure about that?” Honestly, she read my mind as I asked myself the same exact question in return.
Greg touched a nerve for my family and perhaps yours too. Fear lurks everywhere, but as someone reminded me recently, fear is just false evidence appearing real, requiring courage to lead us to faith.
As I spent some time with today’s order of worship, I noticed a thread throughout. Like fear and faith, this morning through song and word we will explore light and darkness, gain and loss, strength and weakness, joy and pain. Binaries like these expose life to be what author Cole Arthur Riley calls a “sacred spectrum.”
We rarely experience light without knowing darkness, life without facing death, joy without feeling pain — but instead they exist within our hearts and lived experiences as sacred spectrums. And like in today’s song from the basement, “each need their moment to shine,” and that can sure be a hard pill to swallow.
Riley goes on to say, “Fear can make us demand definition from mystery. We condense and simplify our own stories to make them clear and resolved. But instead, perhaps we need to remember that we are not singular, but are free to be more than one thing.” I’m in a season of life where God is making it known that two truths can co-exist at once — in fact, perhaps they need one another in order for me to fully grow into my own becoming. So instead of finding resolution, I’m finding the freedom to feel it all.
Perhaps God is wanting to expand in you and is using a sacred spectrum to do so. Today as you notice one of these binaries, consider how you can honor your own becoming through this knowing that life is indeed a sacred spectrum.