Home Pastors Pastor Blogs The Knee-Buckling, Breathtaking Agony of Clarity

The Knee-Buckling, Breathtaking Agony of Clarity

I have to admit – I don’t like the feeling of it.

But I seek it out like lost treasure.

It’s the sort of insight about myself that knocks the wind out of me and buckles my knees at the sheer thought of it.

It’s what I’m doing wrong or not well enough.

The misalignment of my values and my actions.

It’s clarity.

And I allocate a substantial amount of my yearly budget to experience it.

The inertia of life is to be comfortable. To learn from the same instructors. To read books by the same authors.

Mostly because we already agree with them. There’s nothing agonizing by our exposure to them. We get to stay the same.

Learning and growing should feel like a terrorist attack on our own assumptions.

It should leave us feeling overwhelmed, heads spining, staggering to our cars… desperate for some alone-time to process this haunting new perspective.

And then we go back and apply it, leaving us never the same.