Paula Abdul, Amish Barn-Raising, and the Integration of Our Personality

The seven or so weeks after spring break in IV-staff-land is always deceptively busy. And this year I'm feeling it. I have been working late nights, weekends, and burning the proverbial candle at just about any end I could find. I'm feeling it. I'm tired.

And perhaps my readers are feeling it--I've felt really blog un-inspired the past several weeks.

When I get like this, odd things eek out. It's like exhaustion releases the stuff that's buried in my sub-conscious. Last week I caught myself singing the Paula Abdul classic, "Straight Up" which I of course knew every single word to, like every good teenager in the late-eighties/early-nineties.

And Paula Abdul is unfortunately preferable to some other things that have at points floated through my mind in my physically/emotionally/spiritually tired state over the past several weeks.

When I get a moment to step back and think, all this reminds me how much I am and will always be a mystery even to myself. There's just parts of me, things rolling around in my brain and heart and soul that I will never fully comprehend. And there's pieces of me that I just don't get.

We severely over-estimate our ability to understand ourselves. Only God truly knows us. The stuff that we're ashamed of. The stuff that seems to be in conflict within ourselves, our varying impulses and conflicting desires and the things that contribute to our dis-integrated-ness.

And the good news is that as we follow Jesus, he invites us onto a path of integration. He offers to take the gifts and desires and quirks and even the things that are destructive and work with those things to build a fully-alive human being.

"The Glory of God is man, fully alive" a guy named Irenaeus once said. God, like a gifted gardener, is glorified by the fruits of his labor--his people, as they become more and more alive in Christ.

The pieces of our personality are like scattered wooden beams. One of God's works over the course of our lives is to work with those pieces of our personality like a gigantic Amish barn raising. And at various points in our journey it might look awkward or off or like the pieces just can't possibly fit together. But God's at work, and we must be patient with his process.

To be a Christian, I once heard, is to give as much as we know of ourselves over to as much as we know of Christ. This is our part as God moves to make us whole. Some parts are un-usable and have to be burned up. Some parts need massive re-working, re-tooling. All the pieces of us need redemption.

To be sure, it's a process that will never be completed this side of our resurrection. But the good news is that God has tied himself to us, unbreakably and forever. And he will take all our various parts and bring them together for our good and his glory.

Even those Paula Abdul lyrics.