Tunnel ("Through" Part I)

I realize it's been a little while since I last wrote, and apparently there has been a bit of a backup of thoughts over that time. Either that or God has seriously astounded me in the last few days with some heavy stuff. Probably both. Definitely the second one. So please bear with me through this though it may turn out to be a little lengthy...

The story I had been sharing several weeks ago began to be written early in my junior year of high school, in a time where I just beginning to understand the relationship I now relish in. I didn't have any idea really what it was I was writing as I sat in my old youth room that evening and quickly scribbled out a small section and incredibly rough draft of what has now become that story, especially that it would become what it is, but after a couple of years of additional parts and bits of editing here and there, there it is. Over the years I have often found myself looking back through it from time to time. And it never fails to continually astound me that all of that...that's us. That tunnel, that whole thing, that's us through and through.

An obvious meaning of the tunnel is natural human depravity, while we are trapped inside our sin with seemingly no way out. That is, until Jesus took a giant sledgehammer and shattered that tunnel by and in His love for us. But the tunnel has a very much more personal meaning as well.

We all go through our own personal Hell on Earth. We all have our tunnel, a tunnel that does not truly exist but still torments us day in and day out sometimes to the point of utter desperation. A place we loathe but simply cannot seem to escape. Escape the anguish, the bitterness, the solitude, the rage, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the darkness...

We just can't get out.

This tunnel can be any number of things: relationships, identity, even our very humanity. And very rarely is it exactly the same for two people because we each have different minds, different ways of thinking. Different torments. Mine is pretty much as close to literally all in my head as you can get. My tunnel is my mind itself. Call me your classic overthinker, and so often it is so easy for me to retreat into the dark recesses, making it just that much harder to pull myself back out when I truly wish to. For years now I've been wrestling with it, and still I can't seem to completely rid myself of the darkness of this tunnel that does not exist. But this isn't Sean 101 so moving on with my point....

The ironic thing about all of this though, is that so often God is the very one who in His magnificent Love chose to bless us with the very thing that becomes our tunnel, like for me a mind that enjoys going into overdrive way too much. For many people it's an extraordinary desire to love, and especially to be loved, even to the point of extreme measures. I would encourage you to contemplate and try to define what your particular tunnel is if you haven't already. You'll be surprised what kind of light it can shed. But when you think about it, the fact that it is the things God blesses us with the most that we view as our deepest curse makes all the sense in the world, for what is sin at it's most basic level but a denial of the things of God, and what do we find in sin, what is darkness really, but a twisted and perverse imitation of the brilliance of the things of God?

Like I said, we all have our own tunnel. But still, there is that crack. And what hope there is in that.

But even on a slightly simpler, day to day basis, how often do we seem to encounter tunnel after tunnel after tunnel. And being only as human as we are, we can only take so much before we ourselves start to crack, to break. And we beg, plead, pray for God to somehow steer us around them before we really even have to deal with them. Because the tunnel...well it's not a exactly a fun place to be. Definitely not filled with the joy and peace and love we were promised when Jesus tore down the tunnel and washed away the anguish, the bitterness, the solitude, the rage, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the darkness by His incredible sacrifice.

Or is it?

See that's the thing, with the hope we have. We can actually make it through the tunnel...not just slyly sidestep around it.

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for You are with me..." Psalm 23:4

This past week we had the first Veritas forum at Western Kentucky University, and though I thoroughly enjoyed listening to one of the world's more prominent quantum chemists it was the conversations afterward that really shook me. I eventually found myself conversing that evening about the Love of God, of all things, and eventually the conversation come to a point where one of the people we were talking to made a comment about how God wasn't always Love, couldn't have been, because how could all of that wrath and anger be part of a loving God?

Now this is a question that has been pondered and discussed for centuries, and me with my measly 19 years of life experience could never hope to have discovered the absolute answer to this question. It also reminded me of the question that always seems to come up: Why do bad things happen to good people? How can there be so much suffering in a world that a God who loves, who is Love, rules and reigns over?

The first thing I thought of was the example of the Father, the reason we call Him Father and part of the reason why He is referred to as our Father. Any parent will attest that when a child misbehaves, when they disobey, rebel, whatever, discipline is needed. Not because they love to reprimand their child, but simply because they love their child.

But then another comment was made about how some parents are less severe with discipline, while God seems to be almost cruel, abusive was the word used. How could a loving God kill hundreds, thousands of people. This got me thinking, and I really wish that they had waited a few more minutes to kick us out because I never really got to think through and answer this question. At the moment I mentioned how well the penalty of sin is death, eternal death of course. And I've heard it said before that when those people died it was because the wages of sin is death as it says in Romans, and that because of their unrepentant hearts it would have been their fate anyways, which of course is something only God can know. And maybe that's true. But maybe there is more to it than that...