“I am enough” can be the verbal equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and yelling “la la la la la… everything is fine!” while the house is on fire.  And, no matter how many daily affirmations you say to yourself in the mirror, those liabilities aren’t going away.  In that striving to convince ourselves and others that we are self-sufficient, we drive ourselves into physical and emotional sickness.   

It’s possible to take in soundwaves through your ear canal, have them register on your ear drum and never actually hear what another person is saying. So much of our breakdown today is this, not hearing one another. We then make up all kinds of things about the other person based on what we think we heard. Abracadabra – division.

It’s tempting to live life reacting to what you don’t want, but it will never actually get you to the destination you are called to. It’s like driving through live, but only looking in the rearview mirror - you are destined for an accident. Being certain about what you don’t want is not the same as being certain about where you are headed.

When things feel grey, out of our control or unpredictable, the human spirit works overtime to move us towards certainty. We would rather know the truth in its entirety and be absolutely unshaken in our version if reality than live in the tension of life. So we move to polarities: everything and everyone is either all good or all bad. Communities are categorized into predictable boxes, and are expected to stay there. We become experts on the experts and declare our version of expertise to be the real expertise.

In many ways, this pandemic has just revealed a deeper internal yearning to live a life that is free. Masks, restaurants and gatherings are just external representations of what I believe is a core longing in humanity. I wonder what would happen if we started having a conversation about that before we debated how many should gather for Thanksgiving.

I believe one of our greatest spiritual abilities as human beings is to imagine. No other creature on the planet has this very unique attribute of God himself, and is part of what makes us Divine image bearers.