Surprised by Paradox
We are continuing to look at soulful practices for the first few months of 2021 and are focusing on the mind this month.
Last time I shared Ask This Question Daily! and next time I hope to look at some of the principles Dr. Caroline Leaf highlights in her research on neuroplasticity, the mind-brain connection, and how deliberate disconnection from technology and space for reflection can heal our brains and transform our lives!
Fittingly, I am taking 40 days off of social media and am grateful I can still serve you here on the blog and through my Soulful Words email.
Today I bring you February’s book reflection on a timely topic—paradox!
A friend gifted me the book Surprised by Paradox, by Jen Pollock Michel, this past Christmas.
Given our culture’s struggle with triggering conversations lately, I was intrigued.
Division, dissection, and discrimination define the polarization that’s bathed our world in anxiety and hate this last year.
Though we try, hot topics don’t usually fall into black and white categories, because real life is a prism of complexity.
There is rarely one answer and one right way.
Rather than struggling, arguing, or ‘canceling' those who don’t fit into our paradigms, there is a hopeful light that invites us to hold more space for people even as we consider the paradoxical topics presented in this book.
Yes, there are hard lefts or rights in life and Scripture—but what if there is a lot more room to embrace nuance and paradox in our conversations?
With this we have the antidote to many tensions felt within Scripture. This same remedy translates to our world’s tensions.
While I'm reflecting on this book in a linear fashion, as both a summary and commentary on the themes, each section enhances and builds on the overarching theme seen in the subtitle: the promise of And in an either-or world.
Jen Pollock Michel weaves together personal stories, theological quotes, and insightful thoughts as a way forward in even the most volatile times and confesses:
The great modern lie is one of infinite human autonomy and control.
This thought is expanded later when she says:
Paradox has promise for forming humility in us all.
Do you agree? We try to cling to elusive control and absolutes but liberty is found as we surrender in humility to mystery and complexity!
Pollock Michel eloquently invites us on a four-part journey of paradox.
1. Incarnation
The first section of the book considers the great wonder of the incarnation of Christ. Our King of Glory came in the most vulnerable form, not just as a human but as a vulnerable baby!
Within all this mystery Pollock Michel says, "just because it can't be explained doesn't make it false.” This is the “Great I AND.”
Our Christian marriages are a paradox where “we must also learn to practice rigorous, risky honesty” by both dying to ourselves AND showing up wholeheartedly every day!
Over and over we see in the Bible that "faith doesn't always divide the world into two clean halves of right and wrong." Pollock Michel entices us to consider if we too could be added to Jesus’ motley crew when she says "the holiest people live the crustiest lives."
She reflects on how her start at writing down stories, remembering, and beginning to share on her blog felt like a paradox: one person magnifying their small story as a magnification of a big God. Pollock Michel says:
The paradox of God's story is that he's chosen to write its timelessness in the ticking heart of his son and that he's choosing to write in our ticking hearts too.
Oh, how I love our creative God. He keeps us on the edge of our seats when the way up is down, the way to fight is on our knees, and the way to freedom is to surrender!
Pollock Michel addresses pride through this same lens:
Might it be that in Jesus Christ we are more unimpressive than we ever dared admit, more glorious than we ever dared dream?
Both desperate sinners and redeemed saints, God shines through our cracked vessels the light of a Jewish baby, the Son of God, the Great I Am.
2. Kingdom of God
The second section of Surprised by Paradox considers how paradox plays out in the kingdom of God and Pollock Michel shows us this in these poignant statements:
…there is no square inch of our lives that Jesus doesn't intend to rule.
Paradoxically, God is a God who both reveals and hides.
Look at the least, Jesus said, and see how much they are set to gain in God's kingdom.
She compares the lives of A.W. Tozer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, presenting another beautiful example of how both the wealthy and the poor can be used for the kingdom of God. She goes on to say:
Maybe the paradox of the kingdom is not just that it can be enjoyed by the poor and the forgotten but that it could also belong to the rich and comfortable.
Pollock Michel assures the affluent:
The material gifts God provides need not be a source of shame, even if they must be handled with great caution.
And through the mystery of the incarnation and the pursuit of God's kingdom, we are summoned into a language of grace. Pollock Michel says:
No, grace was not God's afterthought; it was his first thought.
3. Grace
Surprised by Paradox climaxes within these chapters on grace as Pollock Michel shares the vulnerable story of God’s transformational work in her life after living in sexual sin in her teen years.
Each time she shares a personal story in this book I feel safe enough to look at my own areas of waywardness and drawn to continue on my journey of transformation!
Here are a few things she says that reflect this:
We don't get grace because we change our lives, but our lives are changed because we get grace!
And yet, though grace will take us as we are, it will not leave us there.
On the other side of saving grace, we are meant to put ourselves, by whatever means possible, in the path of transformation.
Grace accepts us as we are and invites us to raise our bar a little higher—as I talked about in my last blog post.
As a surprising way of conclusion, the final chapters of Surprised by Paradox welcome us into a celebration of lament!
"Lament isn't the road back to normal, it is the road back to faith.” —Jen Pollock Michel
4. Lament
Here in the final chapters of the book, we are assured our faith is deepened even as we ask the hard questions of God—as we weep and tear our own clothes. Pollock Michel says:
Lament voices complaint, but it advances towards confidence; it names petition, but then marches towards praise.
I was discussing this book with a friend, the one who gifted me it in fact, and she emphasized how we actually need more faith to bring our questions to God.
She recognized the choice we have in moments of deep struggle to reject God and turn our questions onto people or bring them to Him.
Bringing our hardest questions to God forms within us our own mysterious paradox of faith!
Surprised by Paradox can be used to help us fight the language of our current ‘cancel' culture. We can embrace what appears to be conflicting views—whether they be political, theological, or relational—with a graceful celebration of mystery.
As a theological story-teller, Pollock Michel unveils the beauty of the "Great I And” chapter by chapter.
Get up on your tippy-toes, tilt your head and even lay upside down for a bit as you look at each of these paradoxes up close. You may be surprised to see that even from the most obscure angle, these heavenly mysteries are held together by radical love.
As I worked through this book in the midst of a pandemic I pondered, maybe there aren't as many hills to die on AND maybe every hill is one to climb up and lay myself down on!
I can work with this because like Pollock Michel noticed with the Israelites:
Faith was not always seeing God in the present tense; it was often the act of observing God in retrospect.
What a gift to remember and stand in awe at what He has done and slowly begin to imagine where He is going next!
How are you wrestling with paradox in your life or in your faith right now?
