The Space Between: A Meditation

Recently, our nine-year-old daughter came home from school and proclaimed that she was learning to play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano in music class. She plunked out each note with a precision reserved for launching a nuclear weapon or signing your first mortgage. Our five and three year old children had their own musical compositions to show us. Suffice it to say, their renditions had a cacophony of notes with unique harmonies and uncertain meter. They were free-form to the extreme. But for our oldest daughter, and in our lives, it is the spaces between the notes that come to take on as much, if not more, meaning.

We need to carve out space in our busy, hectic lives. Our identity is not bound to our ability to make, acquire, produce, consume, or develop. Sometimes we think that making or consuming whether that means products, connections or experiences will fill in the gaps in our souls. But when we let those gaps become places where we meet God, amazing things happen.

It’s the space in between the notes that matter.

Recently, I’ve been talking with a friend about the uncertain, in-between place that she’s been in. She’s living with a good deal of ambiguity and unknowingness. It’s a place that we all find ourselves in from time to time. We enter into this in-between space and time holding one set of assumptions and ideas, and we exit it in a different way. To truly enter the cauldron of transformation, metanoia, repentance, and rebirth is to enter the space between where we meet God and are changed.

Because it’s the space in-between that counts.

Adam Klinefelter, A Year of Meditations, Forward Movement Publications, 2015

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