The Space Between
I try diligently to make some “in between” time each evening.
I think of it as “in between” because it comes after I’ve done what feels like enough of all I “have to” and “should” do in a day, and before all my people begin landing back at home, ready to wind down their days. It’s the time when I feel most free to focus, for just a while, on what I want to do.
I try to appreciate the things I “have to” and “should” do. Granted, I enjoy some of them more than others, but that’s just Real Life, isn’t it? Part of living as a productive, adult human. Can’t we often look back and remember when we wished for the things that have become today’s responsibilities? I can.
Since responsibilities and “have to” things make up the majority of my life, it’s bothered me for a long time to think of wishing it away, one workday at a time.
I have done that: Wished away years counting down to one week’s vacation. Wished away weeks by, starting every Monday, counting down to Friday. Don’t get me wrong: I think we need things to anticipate. I just know that, unless I’m careful, I can focus so much on what I want that I forget to enjoy what I already have each day.
When I manage to get that daily “in between” time, I use it to write. That feels so important to me.
I recently heard Charles Martin, an author I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading this summer, talk about a challenge shared by most writers: The one to put our “butt in the chair” and just write something. Every day. I find myself, more and more, seeing everything through the lens of a writer, but I certainly do not have the butt-in-chair-and-just-write part nailed.
I allow so much Real Life to get in between me and that.
In a recent conversation, someone asked me what I do these days. Looking back later, I realized that I had mentioned all the things from my Real Life: The things I “have to” do. But I never even thought to mention the thing I want and love to do: Sit down with a flashing cursor - and write.
That made me think: My in between time is when I feel free to do what I want to do. So, doesn’t the way I choose to spend it say the truest thing about me? I think it does. So, why in the world do I skip over that part, even in my own thoughts, when telling the story of my life right now?
Everything I do each day – even the things I consider “in between” – it all makes up every one of my todays: My Real Life.
Once I started thinking about this, the idea just wouldn’t leave me alone. I seemed to notice some different version of “in between” every day. Every chance I could find, I put my butt in the chair and tried to make sense of my thoughts through writing in a document I’d titled, “The Space Between”.
Real Life would not stop getting in the way.
Last week in “Define Fun”, I gave you a little glimpse into some of it. I missed publishing two Fridays in a row because I hadn’t made enough time to write. The first time I failed to post a blog as usual, I received a message from a dear reader expressing concern as to why. I explained truthfully that I had something I wanted to say, and that I’d really tried, but just hadn’t gotten it done. That maybe I could finish it over the weekend. I planned to try.
“I’m sure that when it does work out, the timing will be exactly right for the person supposed to see it,” she said.
That encouraged me. It reminded me that maybe all the obstacles had happened for a reason, as I believe most things usually do.
I welcomed the following Saturday morning feeling hopeful that I could finally focus and write what I meant to write. I poured my coffee and put my butt in the chair - ready to try.
That hopeful feeling lasted maybe an hour…
Then Real Life barged into yet another of my days.
For now, it doesn’t feel important to share all the details of exactly what happened – although maybe someday I will. Instead, I’ll skip to the part where I emerged from the experience so upset with, and even worse, disappointed in someone I love. Rather than spend words on the details, I want to make sure you understand: Just as might happen in your life, struggles – real ones - also sometimes blindside me.
Maybe we can’t see it outwardly in each other, but we do have that in common.
Insert your own struggle or disappointment as you imagine this story, and maybe you can relate when I say that the experience left my mood (and my motivation to try and create anything positive) pretty banged up, to say the least.
I spent the rest of the day feeling the weight of that situation like a dark, heavy blanket over my spirit. Deep down, I knew that it, too, represented a “space between”:
That messy, uncomfortable place where we learn things the “hard way”. The very same place where the most lasting lessons and opportunities for true growth happen.
Allison Fallon said, “The most loving thing we can ever do for anyone is to let them have their process.”
Sometimes the only way we can really hold on is to let go; to allow that process to happen however it must.
I know this. I want the wisdom and strength that come on the other side. I just have a hard time appreciating it as I live through it.
I can’t turn off the part of my brain that drew a connection between even this and what I’d been trying to write. But truthfully? I also just couldn’t make myself keep caring at that point. Right or wrong - mad, upset, and human - I just didn’t feel like dragging myself past it just yet.
“No wonder you can’t write! You’ve spent all week trying to say words about appreciating all of life, but here you are: Wanting nothing but for a day to end.”
In anything worth doing, forces will and do come against us.
Things that could easily stop us.
Sometimes the words we say to ourselves are the most powerful of those forces.
I did basically wish that day away, and I went to bed early that night.
Thankfully, I awoke on Sunday with some perspective and ready to move on. I still thought of the whole situation I’d faced the day before as some sort of test I’d failed. How did I really live that “space between”? What right do I have to try to talk to anyone else about it? I felt far removed from the idea of continuing to write about it. Too much mess had repeatedly gotten in my way.
Maybe I’d had it wrong all along.
I otherwise approached the new day determined to make positive choices that would help me reset. I sat down with my morning devotional reading. (Not because I have my life so together, but because I do not. I need all the help I can get to learn how to live each day.) I looked up some extra passages that had come to my mind and my heart as I’d processed the difficulties of the day before.
Then I got dressed and headed to my Peloton bike. I had, as usual, scrolled through the app on my phone first and selected the ride I planned to take. I climbed onto the bike, clipped in, and touched the screen to load the class library. At the very last second, for reasons I can’t explain, I hit “start” on a completely different class than the one I had chosen.
As it began, the first notes of the opening song certainly got my attention: Dave Matthews Band – “The Space Between.” Wow. Interesting.
A half-hour later, I finished the ride and jumped into the shower – the place where I do some of my best thinking. How crazy that the “Space Between” had shown up again, in that way. I also thought about the extra reading I’d done that morning. I noticed it all, but I still didn’t plan to continue trying to write about it.
After my shower, I grabbed my laptop for my favorite part of Sunday mornings: Crosspoint Church’s online service. As the message began, it amazed me when I quickly realized I could see it heading directly toward that “extra” bit of scripture I had gone out of my way to search earlier that morning. When it DID… Whoa. Interesting… I thought that for the second time in an hour.
You might have a hard time believing what happened next, because I honestly couldn’t believe it myself.
As Pastor Kevin Queen delved further into the message, it gradually began to drift in a direction that didn’t seem obviously related to where it had begun. As I listened to his words with a growing sense of where they might lead, I thought, “Surely not…”
I hung on every word, right up to where he used the term “Liminal Space”. Then, for all the people like me who didn’t know exactly what that meant, he explained:
“It’s The Space Between”.
Please picture me with my hand raised to Heaven when I tell you that, at that moment, I quite literally dropped everything, turned to my screen, and said out loud,
“OK, God! I hear you. I understand!”
I didn’t need to understand exactly which part of the concept He didn’t want me to abandon to know for sure that He did not want me to abandon it.
Maybe that had been exactly it all along: All I ever really needed to understand is that it all matters.
Don’t we really spend most of our lives in the “space between”?
Between the highs and the lows.
Between where we once were and where we hope someday to be?
Between “Everything’s great,” and, “We have got to figure this out…”
I know I do.
Doesn’t the way I live in that space say the most about how I really live my life?
I don’t have everything I want. I pray daily for things I KNOW God CAN do, even though I have no way of knowing if He WILL. What if in fixating on the future, waiting for circumstances that may never come, I sacrifice the good I can find in today?
It has taken me nineteen days to write these two-thousand words. Countless interruptions have tempted me to give up. Five-days in, I received the encouragement that the eventual timing would work out perfectly for the person “supposed to see it”.
Now I see:
That person is me.
I finish this piece still thinking about the space between, but for entirely different reasons than I began thinking about it a few weeks ago.
Without all that happened in between, I would have written from the standpoint of someone who thought she had it all figured out. Instead, I ended up living through some things that reminded me of how little I really have figured out, and I’ve written a true record of it.
And HOW ABOUT the way God got my attention?? When He has something for me, it doesn’t matter how much I mess up: He will not let me miss it.
It has all helped me learn:
When I begin any chapter in the story of my life, I can’t know the ending.
