I’m an all or nothing sort of guy. People who know me know that I live on one extreme or another. In friendships, I hate the type of friend you hang out with all the time, but never really truly know because they guard themselves off. I’d rather just be a contact or a good friend, nothing really in between. Hang out buddies drive me nuts. In dating, I either want to be on dates one or two, or in a long term relationship. Dates three to whatever are just annoying. They just seem to fill the gaps of time. I think that by date two, I generally know whether or not I want to be with someone. That’s why most of my dating relationships never go past two dates. Correction: all of my relationships over the past 6 or 7 years have never gone past two dates. In knowledge, I either want to be in the newly discovery stage or in the expert stage. I hate being in the middle where I know enough to discuss something, but not enough to really add new ideas to the conversation. In work, I either want to be the CEO or nothing at all. What does this all mean? It just means that I have been ignoring the middle ground that exists and as much as I’d like to avoid it and have tried to, I simply cannot.

Of course, the problem has been me all along (as it usually is). In my faith quest in Christianity, I have always admired two types of people: the people that were truly saved by an impossible grace from the worst sort of lives (drug addicts, people who were abused as children, people who were raised in the hardest of conditions, etc.) and the people who have lived their lives perfectly. An example of the former would be the sort of pastor that you’ll find serving in a compassion ministry that focuses on outreach to the person that they once were. An example of the latter wold be the sort of pastor that you find raised in a Baptist background with a series of preachers that preceded them. Of course I’m being a little too general, but you get the point. The thing I admire about each of them are that they lived in either extreme. It almost seemed like they skipped the middle ground. For them, it was a 180 transformation. I’m not saying that they didn’t experience pain or hardship, that they didn’t suffer or struggle, but that in the line of faith, they were either there or they were on the complete other end of the spectrum. There were no questions as to how much God knows or why suffering exists in the world. The questions came after their arrival into faith – something that I am questioning in myself. I wonder if I have arrived into faith or if I am living in a horrible self-deception.

I know Jesus lived and I have studied and found conclusion that the Bible is unbelievably accurate and consistent. That means that I really have had to decide whether or not Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, or truly what he said he was, Lord. The reasons for faith make sense as a Christian, especially since the great battle is generally within ourselves, as to whether we want to be God or let Him be who He already is. In other words, I have come to a peace within myself that I am not the Ptolemaic center of the universe, but that God is the one who holds it all in His hands, as difficult as it is to accept. I have also come to accept that what is, is not what should be, and not what will always be. But even when I know all of that, I have lost a sort of innocent faith that requires a blindness to all the information while delicately holding the truth in a cradle. At times, I fear that I have found too much evidence to have faith and that my faith has become stale because of it.

I don’t want to live a life where I am certain of the facts of faith and not experience it. The two extremes I have noticed so often are that people experience the information they know. They are not cluttered by the knowledge, nor are they calloused to it. It seems to kneed out the knots of apathy in the lives of so many people that truly live our their faith whether or not they know all the answers or facts. I want to be sold out that I can’t help but live it, breathe it, and dream it 24/7.

So the middle ground of faith.

What I’m saying is, I hate the process, I always have, but I know I always won’t. Its a very real aspect to faith that I need to learn to embrace. And the reality is, that its the ability to live in the present. I admire people who can learn from their past, consider the future, and fully live in the present, but that is one ability that I have found myself lacking in severely. If there was a point of pride, I’d consider myself one of the best at learning from the past and dreaming up an imaginative future, but shamefully, I always miss the present. It was the same in every experience I have ever been a part of. And that might be why nothing is ever good enough.

I compared everything to my idea of the best whether the best existed or not. Outside of great food, there has never really been anything that I described as perfect. Maybe that’s why I love to eat at such high end restaurants or completely infamous hole in the walls. Food seems to be the only thing that if done right, cannot disappoint me. But with every school I went to, every program I have been a part of, every church I attended, and every organization I worked with/for, something has been completely and utterly wrong. I never found myself satisfied because I always wanted more and I always wanted it better.

My mom had a dream of me before I left, and whether you believe it or not, the accuracy is astounding. I was on a bike riding down a road. I peddled so furiously that I didn’t take notice of the oncoming traffic or the things I was passing on this road. Everything was a blur and I was always in a hurry. When I had arrived, I found myself severely cut and injured on my leg as I had been swiped by a truck while peddling and it was only when I had stopped that I noticed the injury.

While praying for me, my friend Maddie wrote that she saw a compass with a needle that kept spinning wildly. It spun in every direction and kept on spinning until it finally landed on the North Point and just stopped. She attributed it to my many passions and finally finding a singular passion while I was here.

Both of them rang true for me and resonated in my soul. So much so that yesterday, I called my mom and Maddie to hear their voices. I wish I had told them everything that was going through my mind, but even as I write this, I am struggling to find the words to write.

My pride has killed me up to now. My invulnerability to become a subject to the process and to embrace the present. It hindered my learning to really only hear what I wanted to hear. It stopped me from truly experience life as it was meant to be experienced. In the present.

I can’t do it on my own. At the end of the day, I am learning to be humble. To stop rushing a million miles an hour and to take the time to step back and smell the flowers. My prayer is that God will teach me to enjoy the present and all that it encompasses.

Middle ground, here I come.

One life, letting God make it count.