Freedom to be a lurching paradox :)

I was reading some blogs in my travels yesterday, comments from my blog friends talking about the freedom we have in God and how great the blogiverse is as a forum to be able to communicate with each other and share our journeys. Many of us seem to be going through the same sorts of growth spurts and freedom discoveries.

I have certainly had a great deal of growth over the last year or so. I am aware of the paradoxes occurring in my life - the battles within myself, and yet a greater and greater grounding and centering in God and a peace - growing creativity, with more and more realisation of how scared I am of my own creativity - growing awareness of the vastness of God's Body on earth and what it is doing behind the scenes, and yet a frustration that we don't seem to be doing much at all.

So many paradoxes. There are so many times I am tempted to delete posts I have written here because what I have said in one post is directly contradicting how I am feeling right now (and it works both ways, both in negative and positive things written). But surely this is what growth is? It's not some linear projection, ever onwards and upwards, beginning with a shiny happy person and culminating in an even shinier happier person, that can be forecast in a spreadsheet? It's life, birth, in all its mess.

And so even though I feel rather vulnerable at times with this blog thang, despite not being able to see any of you, I don't want to delete anything. I don't want to silence and sugar-coat my journey (I have tendencies towards wanting to display that anyway). I have silenced parts of myself for a long time (which for those who know me in real life must be rather a humourous comment seeing I'm such a loudmouth but still - another paradox :) I have felt for so long like a second-class Christian because I am dealing with this thing and that thing and the other thing - but there is no class of Christian in God's hierarchy, as far as I can see. There are different classes of maturity and wisdom, sure - but even then I veer wildly across the spectrum.

So freedom. The real freedom is in Christ, in the Body, in all its permutations, both visible and invisible, here and now and stretching across the ages. The paradox is that it looks much more messier than the reality TV version of life playing outside our windows, but it's real. We're real. We're allowed to be. In all our mess.

Even me :)