Climbing to the light

L.L. Barkat, over at Seedlings in Stone, has written a beautiful post about why we healing takes time.  I love the image of being stuck in a labyrinth, and having to climb out even after we’ve found light.

It parallels nicely with another image of growth that I’ve come across.  It’s like we’re climbing from the bottom of a sphere to it’s center by spiraling upward along the outside wall until we hit a tunnel that goes to the middle.  As we climb, our path around the sphere gets longer and longer, and we mirror that by becoming bigger and bigger inside.  Even though the path changes, though, we cover the same ground again and again.  We walk past the same places, though we view them differently.  We find ourselves returning again and again to the same struggles, though at different levels and from different perspectives.  Eventually, we reach the goal, the tunnel that leads us to the center.

We don’t want life to be this way.  We want definitive answers.  We want to overcome problems and sins for good.  Instead, we return to them, again and again.  We struggle past them once only to struggle again later.  We wonder why we’re back here, in this dirty, dingy, disgusting place.

I don’t think we could be anywhere else and have any chance of finding God.  If we didn’t keep coming back to these things, we wouldn’t need him and, quite frankly, I don’t think we’d give him the time of day.  It’s so often in our returning, in the confusion that comes when we find ourselves acting out of old patterns, that makes us realize that we really are deluding ourselves when we think we can do this life on our own.