Tired

Today I am sitting in a coffee shop doing work, observing the world around me and doing some reading. As I take moments of reflection, I realize how tired I am. But this tiredness is not really physical tiredness, but the tiredness of the soul. Perhaps you might think that this is dangerous for someone in my line of work, and perhaps it is, but I am taking measures to help, but I am realizing my tiredness comes from how polarized our world likes to try and be.

A thing that has really hit me recently is how people assume my views on things are based on politics, which brings sorrow to me. My views of the world are strongly grounded in my faith in Jesus and his teachings, yet people will still try and categorize or box me in some weird mold. In fact the very idea that we try and make our world out to be either/or is ridiculous to me. God created beautiful creatures that are dynamic and changing and growing, we can never fit into some nice little package. I believe that we are all called to live into this beautiful dynamic It makes me think of a video that I absolutely love where there is a person putting shapes into various shaped holes (or at least that is the thought), but the person who is 'reacting' to this video starts to get stressed out because the person is putting every block through the square hole! (you can watch the video here). Watching the video, I can see how you can interpret the events in a few different ways, so I am going to look at it from one angle. In the video, the person watching the shapes go in the bucket expect everything to go in to specific shaped hole, but the person placing the blocks does things a little different and shows everything fitting into the same square hole.

Now, you may say that this is an example of everything can fit into the same mold, however I would caution you about that. Each shape is different and unique, but they all fit in the square hole. I would argue that square hole can be seen as humanity and the shaped blocks are the beautifully diverse people that make up humanity. Just because we want everything to go into a certain shaped thing does not mean that it has to, or even should. We should acknowledge and celebrate the beauty and diversity of humanity, of God's creation. Let's acknowledge that we are all human, that we will never be a nice, neat little package and embrace the Chaos and messiness of what it means to be human. In this chaos, let us love one another and care for each other.