God in Gray Spaces

I grew up in a bubble of absolutes, surrounded in shades of black and white. Things were right or wrong, good or bad. There was no middle ground.

As I learned more about the world, though, this bubble expanded and expanded in an attempt to accommodate my new ideas—as long as they were still filtered through black and white lenses.

One day, though, this bubble popped. I could no longer explain the world around me through a narrow lens. I could not reduce other people’s lives and experiences to fit these absolutes.

Once my bubble popped, my mindset shifted. Things I once held to be true suddenly had conditions and circumstances that changed everything. Things went beyond true or false statements to factors actually representing real people’s lives.

You see, very rarely is one thing about a person an isolated element. Rather, it’s tied to everything else about them.

Take for example this belief held by the homeschool circle of my childhood: "Good women should stay home with their kids."

That statement in and of itself is only one factor at play, though, until you consider reasons why this "should" statement may not always be true.

Good women should stay home with their kids…

...unless one is a single mom and has to work
...unless a family needs both parents to work
...unless the woman has a career she loves
...unless the kids' dad stays home with them instead

When examined more closely, the “shoulds” and “should nots” shift when they’re about people.

There are certainly things I still see in black and white—things I will always see in black and white, such as that each person is beloved by God. That He’s still working, even when I don’t see it.

But I've learned to make space for more gray, more unknown, more permission to be wrong, more room to be shaped.

The older I get, the less sure I am about a lot of things. Less sure that I am right about most things.

But I'm also more sure about a lot of things:

• More sure that while I may never know most things, that while God doesn’t always show us the answers, He never fails to show up in our gray spaces.
• More sure that if we look in the messiest and most broken places, we will see Him show up.
• More sure that even when we don’t have the answers, we are always called to show up with His love.
• More sure that He calls me to be a compassionate listener more than a judgmental fixer.

In the coming weeks, I’m dedicating myself to “exploring the gray” in various areas of life. I’ll examine areas I once saw in black and white, the stories that led me to see them as gray, and the ways I’ve seen God show up in those spaces.