"It puzzles me how humans never seem to allow room for change and growth."

Hey everyone.
It feels like its been a while. Here is an email I recovered from a long lost friend. Her name is Shannon Shibata. She was a part of my close circle of friends while I was in Jerusalem and this is her email to me written after she had returned to the States.
I had kept this email because it was so powerful to me and I know it will be for you too.

I have never had a hard time articulating my thoughts and feelings. It has always been something I could do with ease. But lately I find it harder to express what is going on inside. Because I'm not sure what IS going on inside. But here are some thoughts that have crossed my mind concerning people here in the States and the Christianity that has been thrown back upon me like cold water since my return:

It puzzles me how humans never seem to allow room for growth and change. They desire to keep those around them always in a place in the past where they can keep expectation carefully framed and boxed in simplistic egotism. All of us are guilty of being blind to the endless possibility of change and growth. We are more comfortable with the static, unable to wrap our minds around the work of God which is dynamic, always morphing, always changing. Only God himself remains unchanging, in the midst of a world that is shifting as the shadows becoming second by second more like or unlike Him at any given moment. He is the only constant. And part of the beauty of life is releasing fear of the dynamic, allowing people, circumstance and emotion to stretch, ebb and twist, knowing that change is okay because we have a grand and steady iron thread which holds the madness together always; just as the sun rises, His truth is our constancy . Thus goes the adventure.

We who dive deep are the "unknown" of endless possibility in the lives of those in the suburbs of America, where people covet stability and sameness. Every time people encounter us, we are different somehow, full of life, emotion, learning, thoughts, views, expression. They don't understand the catalyst for this spring of gushing waters that swell and flow without a patterned tide. And this makes the world uncomfortable. Because we live and die by our catergorizations. It used to suffocate me, and now, it makes me feel sad and sorry for those who try to rope me into their tidy corners. Its a bondage I dont desire anyone to have to live by.

The last few months have been marked by so much enjoyment of life and change and growth and the endless depths of God I forgot to care about what others thought about it or perceived it. His opion, countenance and confidence became my counter, my measure, my expectation. And suddenly, I woke up able to breathe again. Human measurements dont have a long enough standard to meausure the depths of God. For God has no ceiling, no end to His length. He is the most perfect diamond with infinite faces. And if we are with Him, there is no way our finite ways of measurement could count how far we have the possibility to grow and become more like Him. Every time people encounter those who are truly walking with God, they see a new face of the diamond that is God reflected back in our countenance and it is frightening. And if we try to measure God and put Him in a box when we talk to others would be cheating those aspiring for the full gusto the ability to dream for more than they are living at that very given moment.

True believers are already off the charts of human measurement. They aren't on the radar, they're the ones that have gone beyond the maps to a place yet uncharted. Because "no eye has seen, no ear has heard and no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him." And the place where God resides and allows us to access to is a place where charts and measurements and maps cannot reach. It is an eden that is shrouded to our naked eye. It is the place that most humans and Christians have heard of in mythlike stories but never had courage to believe in the genuine existence of. And the few that have the "nutzo" tendencies for God, (the inborn fire that drives us to believe in the myth of a deeper God, knowing intuitively that which we live is only a fraction of what exists), dive in and realize somehwere in the journey that HIS eden isn't a myth. It is more real than anything in life. And we bring back stories of our journeys to that place where no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has conceived. And we try with words to capture the essence of something that even illudes us because it overloads the senses beyond that which can be captured with words. For THAT is the nature of God.

We look up in the midst of our stories and look into the eyes of those who look back with blank expression, and in one hand they hold a finite measuring stick they grip white knuckled and we begin to realize the obstacle that keeps understanding from dawning. It is the finite meeting the endless and some refuse to take a step into the unknown threshold. Because the closer we get to that threshold we begin to feel ourselves being overwhelmed with that feeling of being annihilated and healed in one swift movement of the current. Its this magnetic draw that feels as though we are being put together and pulled apart in some paradoxical dichotomy. You've felt it haven't you? Tasted it? I know you have. I've seen it waging it's holy war in your face. As the author Calvin Miller said, "the agony and ecstasy together abiding at once in your frame." The walk of a God lover is not an easy or neat and button downed thing. We all want to package it that way, and feel comfort in it, yet the more I live and experience , the more I realize that God turns our worlds in a way that we cannot predict. He will quite literally rock our worlds and he will not be harnessed by our human desire for sameness and stability.

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your thoughts?