Gray Matters

How the heck...

... do people, myself included, keep all our relationships up and running? It just struck me today. It's so damn hard. Like most of the time. Ok, I'm totally over dramatic, but, I spent the weekend teaching leadership and management. And you teach all these little tips and ideas on how to maintain wise relationships to the people you lead and how to encourage and lift up people. And it just hit me... Should it be this hard? Why can't all people just simply understand and love each other?

I know people like that. People who are just loved by everyone, and everyone seems to be feeling loved in return. I, of course, also love those people, it kind of comes with the whole thing, that's what's disturbing. There's just so much to like that it becomes... uninteresting. I know this is a harsh thing to say... but loving almost becomes too easy and I lose interest. I need a challenge. Something to anchor my love in.

I'm in the middle of preparing for my trip to the States (also the reason why I'm blogging, too busy not to do something else). In researching articles and stuff I stumbled over the name of Jars of Clay's new label; Gray matters. I love that name. If you've known me for a while you know how I constantly come back to accusing the church of dividing life into black and whites. I think one of the biggest mistakes we do when it comes to young people is that we make them believe that this world can be divided into good and evil. And then, suddenly, we all realize that the world is actually a gray mess and the church has nothing to say about it.

I love hanging out with people who are accepting their gray little marshy ground called life. And not accepting it like giving up but accepting it as in wanting to build something real out of it. Something worth fighting for. People who make the gray matter. If I look around on the people I truly love or look up to, most of them have been through some real ordeals but they are building. And they are not building chessboards, they are building nice gray mushy things that will last. That I can drop anchor in. Me like.

Maybe then, if we accept that, relationships doesn't have to be so hard? Maybe the times when we do give up on each other, cause I truly think we're entitled to sometimes, is when we can't get out of our chess board way of looking at the other person. When someone is looking at me and trying to understand the good and the evil rather then the whole mess that in the end defines me.

Have no idea what the Jars boys were thinking in naming their label but they got me thinking long enough to avoid packing for another couple of minutes.