SHAKE: This is my journey towards being unshaken

       Wrestler with God.  This was spoken over me as a name in my earlier years as an adult.  It was so true but I wasn’t sure if I should be excited or concerned with how close it resonated.  A positive person doesn’t like to focus on the struggle consistently.  A “Christian shouldn’t be in a constant struggle if God’s burden is easy and light” I often reason with myself.  I am still not sure I can completely tell you why this is a theme of my life (and I feel like many don’t get it), but it’s there.  It’s highlighted throughout my life like the kind of dog or car you start seeing everywhere after you buy it for yourself.  The struggle is highlighted in my inner life and so I see it everywhere in people’s lives and the Bible.  I don’t really see it as good or bad because it can be either but rather as it just is. 

        The struggle is here for my lifetime as a human, so the more important question is how am I supposed to see it or respond?  Am I supposed to fight it and get rid of it more as a problem to fix then a tension to manage?  Or is it a tension to manage more than a problem to fix and I’m supposed to work on it constantly while knowing it's an inevitability. 

What really kills me is riding the middle line in the Christian world.  It is the line between we are all hurting vs we are all meant to be healed.  It is the line right between people who know there is no true life without struggle vs the people who know there is no true life with only struggle.  It’s one I could argue on both sides of the Bible.  Things have been shaken up.  Things will be shaken up.  Things will be unable to be shaken up one day.  So what am I supposed to accept as reality or work towards?  Preparing for a shake or the unshaken.  Asking for a shake or being unshaken?  God, what does it mean for this world to shake?

         It’s almost like David’s Psalms.  He ruins almost every positive great Psalm with something about God’s judgment or enemies.  Have you ever noticed that?  You have a triumphant Psalm about relying on God and his greatness and then right in the middle of it, is something about how he is distraught or how God needs to smite his enemies and bring justice.  I love David’s wrestle.