Growing pains of the soul and Stained Glass

January 21, 2010

Growing Pains of the Soul

I love this concept from Jerry Sittser, that your soul can expand as a result of walking into and through the grief over your loss, and that perhaps God can enlarge your soul – your capacity for living and feeling – as a result.

Living in the confines of my own skin and mind, it is hard to tell when and if my soul is expanding.  In some ways I sense a deepening of my capacities for pain and love, and an awareness of grace and goodness – this feels like my soul indeed may be somehow enlarging.  At other times, I too often feel like my trigger for anger, bitterness, and resentment is shorter and I can follow down those paths with increased ease as well.

Perhaps a larger soul actually allows for both increased experiences of good emotions and larger amounts of empathy and compassion, as well as quicker responses of the negative.  I pray that God continues to shape me in the positive direction – in my capacity to feel the joy and pain in my own heart and in the lives of those I love and those I live and work among.

Maybe I am awake right now at 3:38 am in the morning writing this because, like a child whose limbs can physically ache when are experiencing “growing pains,” my soul too aches to some degree as it expands.

Am I stained glass to my world?

I am reading through a book of compiled writings by Philip Yancey.  In an excerpt I read last evening Yancey described how he is reaching a point in life where he realizes that he really doesn’t have to compete or prove himself to anybody anymore, but rather he is realizing that his job is simply to be “stained glass” and allow God’s light to shine through him so that others will recognize God as that source of light and life.

I am not sure I can presume to be living with this same awareness with any consistency (stained glass vs. it’s all about me and my performance), but as I read these musings I do know that I was immediately drawn to the metaphor and want to live with this freedom from having to perform, impress, compete, and win at all costs.

With very little effort, I also realize how many of the people I engage daily who are so stuck in the performance roles they see as their only options in life.  I feel so sorry for these folks and the ways they each are so wound up and so stuck on self-imposed treadmills of performance measures that they feel they must live up to and are so frustrated when they cannot.

Rather than judge them for this, I feel empathy and sadness as I watch their struggles against life.  I do not want to live in this mode of being on that treadmill that is always increasing in speed and in the pitch of its upward angle. 

Instead, I want to lose this way of life for God’s sake and simply acknowledge that I want to be stained glass that God can shine His light and life through, so that others will see God’s hand at work in my life.