It's Easy Until It's You

Worldview class last year was spent studying subjects, issues, and perspectives at a distance. I read about them; I watched videos about them. These worldviews were real, but they occured or existed in a place far away from my experience. Our class never met these people. Our textbook quoted them, the speakers spoke of them, but we didn't know them. We studied from a distance.

However, there comes a point where the subject matter breaks from a level of mere intellectual stimulation and floods your personal experience. Its wonderful when this event is thrilling and enjoyable, an experience that makes the content one's poured over for hours tangibly and appealingly evident.

It's not always like that. It’s easy until it's unpleasant. It's easy until it's disappointing. It's easy until its disconcerting. It’s easy to distantly handle the problems with the New Age movement until you come to find out that your grandfather has embraced a "Christianized" form of cosmic humanism. It’s fairly easy to handle the problem of evil and suffering until you or someone close to you faces physical or emotional pain. It's easy to handle agnosticism until a friend you've known for years embraces it and then leaves for California. These truths are relatively easy to handle distantly until they begin to play a sad song on our emotional heartstrings.

That song seems to build a level of deep authenticity behind our intellect because what we know is more than subject matter. Rather, it’s tied to relationship and experience. But also, the heart-wrenching melody seems to try our dedication to what we know to be true. While it's important to experience the content as well as know it, its imperative that we do not lose the content for the sake of how we feel towards it in that moment of true experience. Would I confront my grandfather, or avoid conflict? Would I praise God when life hurts, or despair? Would I labor in prayer for my friend, or distance that uncomfortable twinge? ...Would I allow what I know to penetrate further than head knowledge, or would I try to forget that life is war.

It's easy until it's you. Yet, until its you, it's not nearly as meaningful.