Either/Or or Both/And

I've been reading alot by Parker J. Palmer lately. In his book The Courage to Teach he quotes Niels Bohr saying something that has challenged my thinking.

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

Now maybe that doesn't strike you like it does me, but let me tell you why I think that this is such an important idea. Far too often in our hurry to defend the Christian faith we kill the mystery that is God. The reality is that God is bigger than us (and we really should be thankful for that - I wrote about that here) and that often two aspects of His nature may seem to us to be opposites, at times even contradictory. In our struggle to eliminate the tension between two profound truths we often deny things that are visibly true.

These discussions have been seen lately regarding the natural disasters we have been confronted with in the world. The question always seems to surface - "Did God cause these hurricanes/ earthquakes?" Automatically we jump to God's defense. We assume that if He is a loving God that these types of things must come from some other source. And maybe they do. But I'm just not sure that we can assume that everything that we think is good comes from God and everything that we think is bad doesn't. One of the things that I'm "re-learning" recently is that we have to be skeptical of our own assumptions. I talked a bit about this in my sermon yesterday - one of my "subpoints" was that we need to learn to question our questions and stop accepting our assumptions as infallible.

Maybe when something difficult or "bad" happens in our life our first reaction needs to move from questioning where it came from to seeking how God wants to use it to make me who He is calling me to be. Maybe it's an opportunity to show forgiveness to someone else. Maybe it's an event that allows you to visibly show the compassion of Jesus. Maybe we need to begin to consider the possibility that God can transform even the most horrible of events into something beautiful and amazing. Maybe somehow He encounters the evil, soaks it up and transforms it into good. Seems like I remember something about an innocent man and a cross...

The more I understand the more I am aware that I really understand very little. But that's okay. The realization puts me in a place where I am slow to speak for God but hungry to listen to God. And maybe that's where He wants me to be anyway...