Mind Set: Overcoming life's hurdles

Mind Set: Overcoming life's hurdles

 

Getting stuck is not only a necessary part of spirituality, it is a prerequisite to spiritual growth, says Mike Yaconelli

If I were to diagram my spiritual life, it would look something like this: A continual series of ups and downs, through all of my life, moving in a slow upward direction, although some of the lows would seem lower than before and some of the highs would seem higher than before.

When I picture this graph, it is not encouraging at first, because the longer I live, the further away the end of the graph appears. It is very much like the elusive end of the rainbow - the closer I get, the further away it seems.

And yet there is something you cannot see on a one-dimensional diagram, something you cannot express with lines and words. There is a hidden excitement that begins to surface, a tingling of the soul that quickens my consciousness as I gaze at this trail of God in my life. I suddenly realise a great truth-the up-and-down syndrome of my life is the fingerprint of God on my soul! It is the remains of my struggle of faith, the ups and downs of my ongoing dialogue with the God. It is the way growth looks.

I am beginning to realise that the spiritual life is not so much progress as it is process. It is not a continuous climb upwards as much as it is a continuous climb. It is not the victories that matter so much as the going on after the defeats. The longer the erratic dance of faith goes on, the less you care about what God is doing, and the more you want to know about God. Spirituality is, after all, about intimacy with God.

Look at the graph for a minute. Notice the low spots-flat, long at times, surrounded by highs. Whatever the low spots are, they appear to be negative. If the high spots represent the good or positive in my spiritual life and the low spots represent the bad or negative in my relationship with God, then obviously the high spots are to be sought after and the lows are to be avoided.

But what if we do something radical? What if we remove those kind of value judgments from this graph? What if, in place of concepts like good and bad, positive and negative, high and low, we replace our value judgments with words like stalled and moving, or listening and acting, or stopping and starting, or waiting and not waiting?

What does that do to our understanding of the spiritual life? Maybe waiting is good and not waiting is bad. Maybe stopping is better than starting, listening better than acting, and stalling better than moving. Maybe one cannot happen without the other. Maybe stopping is necessary to starting, maybe acting cannot happen without listening first.

Of course, I do not believe there is many ‘maybe’ about it. I believe that our understanding of spirituality has been distorted and ruined by our artificial judgments and our one-dimensional understanding of our relationship with God.

Let me point out a couple of interesting characteristics of this graph. Every high is followed by a low and every high is preceded by a low. Maybe what the graph means is that you cannot achieve a high without first achieving a low. Maybe lows are not low at all, but just part of the highs. I would like to abandon the high or low model and rename these parts as ‘stuck’ and ‘unstuck.’ Maybe, getting stuck is necessary before we can get unstuck, which means that getting stuck is actually a wonderful place to be.

When you look at it like this, then getting stuck is not only a necessary part of spirituality, it is a prerequisite to spiritual growth.

Most people consider being stuck a negative, a sin of failure or burn-out, an indication that a person isn’t working hard enough on their spiritual life. It’s a report card on personal prayer. If you feel stuck in your spiritual life, then you aren’t doing something right because no one should be stuck with God.

Nothing could be more untrue. The truth is that everyone should get stuck with God many times because it is the prerequisite to being unstuck.

Being stuck is a great moment. It may be characterised by frustration, loneliness, or detachment, but those things are only the vocabulary of our souls telling us we are in danger. It is the cry of our souls craving for more. It is our longings and yearnings trying to get our attention. It is a summons, a call from within. It is the glorious music of disaffection and dissatisfaction with where we are now. It is the anguish of our interior life pleading with us not to give up, but to give in.

It is the Holy Spirit stopping us dead in our tracks so we can read the words that God has written on our hearts-surrender. Surrender. Put your arms around your soul, embrace your anguish, respond to your summons from God. Get ready for the adventure of growing on to the next part of your life.

Getting stuck is worth whatever anguish you must go through just so you can hear God say to you, “hang on, you are about to get unstuck.”