I’ve been thinking about starting a live journal for a while and putting it off for the obvious reason: I didn’t have a name that was cool and hip and expressed me and my life and would make people think I was introspective enough to be worth reading and still fun. So I came up with “Living in the Gray” which is not as perfect as I wish it was, but it will do. It describes the phenomenon I’ve been struggling with since I graduated from high school. At that time in my life I strongly believed in black and white. There were right and wrong answers, behaviour, politics, language, spirituality, taste, art, faith, logic and worldviews. In a word I was hugely legalistic. In the years since that seemingly long ago time, because of new experiences and meeting new and different people, because of life, death, hurt, heartbreak, mistakes, birth, joy, depression, love and a slow and painful process of gaining wisdom, I have learned that there is so much more gray in the world than black and white. Everything and everyone has another side. I feel as though in most areas (specifically spirituality and politics) people want you to believe that they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is wrong. They want to be clearly on one side or another, black or white. Gray offends them and when they are confronted with the fuzziness of gray they are quick to judge and quick to label people as weak-minded or unbelieving.
Maybe I am weak minded or lacking faith. Â Just because I walk in gray much of the time, it doesn’t mean I don’t believe in truth or objectivity or science or discovery or faith. It just seems that there is so much out there to learn and know and the very little bit that I know is always being stretched by the knowledge and experience of others. So if I want to claim to know the complete truth about anything, wouldn’t that be extremely ignorant? I believe that we are all on a journey of discovery and there are only a few things that I feel sure of and even those are sometimes a struggle.
So maybe this doesn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but I feel content at this stage. I think it is incredibly presumptuous to try and make assumptions about most things, based on my limited experience. I do believe in God. But if he is as big as I have been taught, then my weak assertions about his purposes and plans are pretty meaningless, other than my own direct experience with him. And even that is subject to my interpretation which is influenced by my opinions and friends and upbringing and hopes and dreams.
Are you feeling a bit foggy yet? If so, don’t panic. It’s a bit disorienting at first, but I’m finding that the more time I spend here, the more I’m learning about people and truth. Truth is out there. It’s just a whole lot bigger than most people want you to believe. So I hope you’ll join me and experience “living in the gray”.
