Living in tension

I am not a musically inclined person. I played viola for about a year when I was in 7th grade. As a going away present when we moved to NJ a friend of mine gave me a guitar. I tried learning from a book. Needless to say it is in its case in the corner of my room. One thing that is obvious to even a novice like myself is that every instrument needs to be tuned in order for it to make the sound it is supposed to make. In the case of stringed instruments tuning consists of finding the right tension in the strings.

As a chaplain, I often use the analogy of finding the right tension to live in when talking to people who have just experienced a traumatic event. The healthy person lives in a constant state of tension but that tension is tuned to produce beautiful music. For example - helping families in hospice who balance the wish for ceasing of suffering coupled with the fact that they don't want to see their loved one die. Being able to hold both of those realities can be difficult.

Living in tension is something that is unavoidable and something every human aspires to do. I am reading a book by John Piper called God is the Gospel which talks, in part, about this very notion and how Jesus is the ultimate example of embodying these tensions.

Piper states:

• we admire him for his glory, but even more because his glory is mingled with humility;
• we admire him for his transcendence, but even more because his transcendence is accompanied by condescension;
• we admire him for his uncompromising justice, but even more because it is tempered with mercy;
• we admire him for his majesty, but even more because it is a majesty in meekness;
• we admire him because of his equality with God, but even more because as God's equal he nevertheless has a deep reverence for God;
• we admire him because of how worthy he was of all good, but even more because this was accompanied by an amazing patience to suffer evil;
• we admire him because of his sovereign dominion over the world, but even more because this dominion was clothed with a spirit of obedience and submission;
• we love the way he stumped the proud scribes with his wisdom, and we love it even more because he could be simple enough to like children and spend time with them;
• and we admire him because he could still the storm, but even more because he refused to use that power to strike the Samaritans with lightening (Luke 9:54-55) and he refused to use it to get himself down from the cross.

The Scottish theologian James Stewart puts it this way:

"He was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men. Yet he spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God. He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out in terror at his coming, yet he was so genial and winsome and approachable, that the children loved to play with him and the little ones nestled in his arms.

His presence at the innocent joy of a village wedding, was like the presence of sunshine. No one was half so kind or compassionate to sinners, yet no one ever spoke such red-hot scorching words about sin. A bruised reed he would not break. His whole life was love. Yet on one occasion he demanded of the Pharisees, how they were expected to escape the damnation of hell.

He was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, yet for sheer stark realism, he has all of us self-styled realists soundly beaten. He was the servant of all, washing the disciples’ feet, yet masterfully he strode into the temple, and the hucksters and moneychangers fell over one another to get away in their mad rush from the fire they saw blazing in his eyes. He saved others, yet at the last, he himself did not save.

There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts which confronts us in the gospels; the mystery of Jesus is the mystery of divine personality."

I am humbled and grateful for God's tuning in my life when I either have the strings too tight or too loose. Sometimes he speaks truth to my heart personally during times of quiet, other times he may speak through a passage of scripture, or a song, or a person. Regardless of how he tunes me, I know that tuning will be a life-long process. That is another thing I learned about instruments - you don't have to do anything for them to get out of tune. The more you make music the more conscious you are of the need for the instrument to be in proper tension.

Enough - now go make some beautiful music while you live in the tension.