In the Middle

You know what we rarely do? We rarely tell stories from the middle. Necessarily, stories have a beginning, a middle or crisis, and an end that, more often than not, resolves said conflict. But, we never write the story in the middle.

More often, people write from a perspective looking backward, having arrived. War-torn and battle-scarred, survivors gaze back over the trial and proclaim, “I made it.”  Stories are tied up with beautiful bows or moral lessons to be learned. All of the uncomfortable situations, mistakes or missteps are safely packaged up as past-tense. Though the story may contain a beginning, middle, and an end, it is always written once the enemy fire has ceased and the threat has passed.

Everyone loves a good redemption story. Everyone loves to hear of transformation and of victory over struggle. People are uncomfortable in the unresolved, in the middle.

It’s easier to write, “I used to struggle with trusting God,” because simply the way in which that is written connotes that the struggle no longer exists.  It’s more comfortable to sit back and read how someone “used to strive for perfection,” with the assumption being that they have now found a balance of grace over perfection. There seems to be a cognitive dissonance with stories that fail to resolve.

The hard thing about telling a story in the middle is the unknown. Because sometimes, the middle is the end. Our situation may not resolve, we may live in the uncomfortable middle for the entirety of our lives. And God is in that too (perhaps, especially) and He is up to something and every single day I need to breathe those truths to myself because a lot of the time I struggle to believe it.

It’s uncomfortable to read about the trenches and the dirty and the questioning of the goodness of the God who is Good. But here I am.  These trenches feel deep and this load feels heavy and God feels far. But this should not keep us from walking together in the trenches, so that we may shoulder each other’s burdens and point out the truths that God is, in fact, not far off  - rather, He is the God who pursues, the God who bent heaven to earth to be with us in the trenches. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

May we never let a lack of an ending keep us from telling the story.