FALLing – Part 4
One of my early memories of autonomy involves selecting my own clothes, a rite of passage and comical endeavor I’ve enjoyed passing on to my kids (sometimes to my frustration). As a young child I was very fashion conscientious and maintained my diva status all the way through…well…today.
I had my style and knew what I liked. In grade school, I wore nothing but sweat pants or athletic shorts and oversized tshirts. In middle school I began to care a lot more and began pursuing name brands and following trends. That continued into high school and I spent every bit of what little money I was earning on my vanity. In the era of the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and 98 Degrees, I fully embraced the boy band persona, complete with frosted tips.
I was steadily building a tower with my name on it so that the world would know who Brett Armstrong was. I worked really hard to create myself for the world to see!
I’m guessing you had a similar experience. Maybe you didn’t pursue the superficiality of Doc Martins or highlighted hair. Maybe you didn’t care as much about fitting a shallow mold of popularity. And maybe you weren’t/aren’t aware of this reality. But I am confident that, in one way or another, you spent your adolescent and young adult years trying to create some identity and establish a place in this world.
We all want that and go about it differently. The truth is we cannot live in the “second half of life” as Richard Rohr describes it until we do the necessary work of the “first half of life.”
Once we have established a place to stand in this world, we will eventually FALL over something, a stumbling block, a self awareness reality check. This fall is a “necessary suffering” as Rohr writes it. Once we have experienced this pain, we then have opportunity to be changed, to grow beyond, to become more, to live in the second half of life. But moving there isn’t guaranteed.
I fell hard in college. When all that I had built up came crashing down, everything changed. My pretty boy, goody-goody, popularity stilts buckled under the weight of a broken relationship and an alleged pregnancy. I had hit my face hard on the floor of my own humanity and it left more than a bump on my head. I had puffed up a public image not unlike a pinata – colorful, creative, artistic, grandiose – but instead of goodness inside I was filled with nothing but air and some poop. So, when life struck me and my guts busted open, it made a huge mess and left a big stink!
Jesus met a Samaritan woman who had also face planted and was in a cycle of falling. She was living a life that was producing nothing but desire for more. Jesus told her that He could provide a drink of living water that would quench her thirst for good. She desperately wanted this water because then, she wouldn’t have to keep coming to the well like she was. She failed to see that Jesus was talking about the deeper thirst in her soul.
Her longing to be filled is what we all strive for. It’s unavoidable and necessary. This longing is to find meaning and purpose. It’s the deep desire for peace. This is the dying to self that Jesus also talks about and the substance that being born again is made from. This is the second half of life that Richard Rohr so eloquently describes.
If we spend our entire lives in the first half then we live like the woman at the well from John chapter 4. We keep chasing that which will NEVER fully satisfy. We’ll ALWAYS be thirsty again. We will fall, and fall, and fall again. We ALL fall down (like a universal game of Ring Around the Rosies), (We all FALL short of the Glory of God…Acts 1:8), but it’s in falling that we are given a new perspective, another chance, offered a different kind of drink, and handed a new reality. It’s up to us after that.
Richard calls us to FALL FORWARD! This is the epitome of Paul’s words that proclaim “If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation; the old is gone and the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17).
See, I still like to be stylish and I’ll buy nice things (occasionally), but my clothes don’t make a bit of difference in the peace in my heart. Fashion is for Fun, but, my Faith is FOR LIFE!
As we conclude this series, celebrate Thanksgiving, and head into Christmas, I cannot think of a better way to wrap this up. Have you drunk the living water? Have you entered into the second half of life?
Sure, there will still be mistakes, mishaps, mess-ups, and missteps. But we are no longer running with our eyes closed chasing voices in a forest. We’ve been awakened and set free with the ONE who ordains our steps, whose word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.
It’s worth the TRIP! I promise.
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