prajapati314

I have recently become a Christian. For the first time in my life I am faced with all of the joy and peace as a believer. I am also faced with all of the questions, confusion, inconsistencies and internal struggles that come with such a decision. I am a new Christian and so I am a bit…not even a bit, but very confused about how I am to walk as a Christian, how I am to be, how I am to live. These are the things that I initially struggled with before but now I am beginning to understand how being a Christian is not to be perfect…to be spiritual is not to attain perfection, to walk a life free of error, mistakes, sin, etc. Being spiritual is about having a particular perception and then acting on that perception, making it a part of your daily life. I had initially been under the impression that to be a “good” Christian was to strive each day to live a rigidly good life. I thought that I should be careful not to do “sinful” things, to think “sinful” thoughts and that any “suffering” that I felt was because I had messed up. According to Christian doctrine we as human beings are divided into flesh, spirit and soul. We are relatively unaffected by our souls so that leaves us primarily concerned with our spirit and flesh. So we are body and spirit, domestic and divine, light and dark, good and evil. We are dualistic in nature. And so the aim of religion it initially seem to me was to elevate the “higher” man in us all, that is, the spiritual man. ... But only somehow through the suppression of our fleshly side, our hidden side, or dark side…leaving a race of people vainly in search of righteousness and pure holiness. A holy people but by no means a whole, complete, fulfilled race of men. We as a people have bought into the idea of polarity; we have bought into the idea of “either-or”. We have bought into the idea of being “black or white,” “this or that”. And so as it relates to religion we are asked good or evil? Heaven or hell? God or Satan? Sin or righteousness? So here I am caught in between the two, wondering which side do I belong to only to realize that by nature I am in the middle, by nature I am betwixt and between, light and dark, sinful and righteous! Heaven and hell exist in me! I am black and white! I am all of these things at once, not one or the other. I am liminal! I am between! I am gray! I am each and every color along the spectrum ranging from the purest white to the darkest shade. I am everything in between! I am all of these things and yet none of them held in isolation. I am the dialectic!!!! I am all things held in suspension and in tension. And so to be spiritual, even to be Christian is in my opinion, to be whole and complete with color, not walking strictly in the shadows or strictly in the light but to walk in the midst of them both, bearing in mind that the Almighty God has you by the hand! It is to bear in mind that Christ Jesus died so that you will have life with color, with choices of color…not choices of simply black and white. He died on the cross and shed the color of red, a color along a spectrum, a color that is not positioned at either end of the spectrum. His act was not a “black or white” act! His act was radical! His act was liminal! His act was dangerous, symbolic...an act of transformation. He did it for us and He did it to glorify God, thereby, for the sinners and the sinless. And in that act He held two opposed natures in tension. His act was an act of skillful balance, an act of in between. His act was gray. And this is “the beauty of gray”.