Life In Paradox

Para­dox is not a place; it is real­ity. A para­dox is some­thing that appears con­tra­dic­tory but is nev­er­the­less true. Light acts as a par­ti­cle and a wave. It can­not be both, but it is both. Para­doxes have extremes that appear to can­cel each other out, but in bal­ance reveal greater truths behind them. Jesus taught in para­dox­i­cal state­ments: “If you lose your life you will find it.” How can you lose some­thing and find it at the same time? The truth behind the para­dox is one you have prob­a­bly already expe­ri­enced: When you give your­self to a greater pur­pose or cause, your life becomes more meaningful.

One of my favorite para­dox say­ings is: “I do not plan to live long, but I am liv­ing for­ever.” It is unrea­son­able to plan to live for more than about one-hundred years here, but it is totally rea­son­able to live in a way that opens life’s pos­si­bil­i­ties infi­nitely. Win­ston Churchill is still around, so is John Kennedy, and St. Fran­cis of Assisi. Their lives were not equal, but their actions still echo in fame or by sheer his­tor­i­cal impact. Every life, no mat­ter how lim­ited, con­tin­ues to echo in some man­ner. We all speak from the grave and beyond it.

In the mean time, I live the con­tin­ual para­doxes of being both a saint and a sin­ner. I give myself away to redis­cover myself. Mil­lions of my body’s cells die each day so I can live. We live and die at the same time. I save money by giv­ing it away. I for­give the unfor­give­able and dis­cover pop­u­lar­ity through anonymity. By tak­ing my life not so seri­ously, I am able to look at it seri­ously and make changes that really mat­ter. The great­est truths are not seen straight-on but out of the cor­ner of one’s inner eye. Some­times I see most by turn­ing a blind eye to what every­one else is watching.

The clas­sic the­ol­ogy that Jesus is both God and man screams para­dox. How can the unlim­ited be expressed or lived in the lim­ited? That can­not be, but appar­ently was and is. Then again, how can some being only a few DNA seg­ments from a mon­key build space­ships? How can it build com­put­ers and do heart surg­eries being eighty-plus per­cent water? Cul­tures that reject the para­dox par­a­digm limit them­selves and do not progress well. Some of them even self-destruct. Life is para­dox­i­cal. About the time you mas­ter one stage of it, that stage is over. Some of the youngest peo­ple I know are old. What I am say­ing makes no sense until you quit try­ing to make sense of it.