Along with pondering the terrible complexity of belief during my weekend away, I also thought about the perhaps even more troubling paradox of how in life two things can be simultaneously true, but seemingly not.
     I think here about the ageless debate over divine sovereignty and human will.  Unless we totally dismiss the fact of God, this is a debate that we will never solve.  I do not pretend to cover all of the issues in a short blog.  Entire books have been written about this question.  What I'm thinking about is how hard it is to live with some sort of metaphysical tension.  By its nature, the metaphysical invites tension. For starters, we can't see it.  And if we attribute to the metaphysical some ability to confer worldly value, such as human worth or cosmic meaning, we compound the issue.  How do we measure such assertions?  How do we compare what we see with what we do not while believing that they are both true?
     On the other hand, if the metaphysical exists, and if it exercises some degree of activity in this material reality, we will always find ourselves believing simultaneously in some sort of divine sovereignty and the fact of human will.  They're both real, they're both true.  By themselves, they do not always make sense, yet together they do not always do, either.
     So what do we do?  We decide that we can live without knowing everything fully even while we resolve to live knowing everything fully, everything, that is, we can hear, taste, smell, touch, and see, yet everything, that is, we do not.  We cannot escape our finitude, we cannot elude our place.  We're sovereign, yet God is, too.  It's a story both of us begin, yet it's a story only one of us will end.
     The challenges--and joys--of humanness.