IN-TENSION-AL LIVING

To be physically and mentally loose takes no talent.  That's just recklessness.  To be physically and mentally tight?  That's called anxiety.  It doesn't work, either. Eventually we snap.  But physical looseness combined with mental restraint?  That is powerful.
                                                                                                       Ryan Holiday

Tension.

There seems to always be a need within and around us of tension.  Don't care?  Not good.  Obsessed?  An opposingly not good.  Tension between the two extremes brings about effectiveness.

To care without being anxious sets one into freedom motion.  Timidity is not transformed into idiocy; but, into courage.  It must be guarded against conforming to what some like to call balance which may be simply an excuse for mediocrity.  No.  We desire to get a productive and meaningful grip.

Everyone wants to matter.  Everyone does.

No one, though, will experience being a difference-maker if we either shrug with Who cares? or live paralyzed by fear.  These are failures of the same extreme.  The other extreme is to live in-tension-ally.

In-tension-al may call for aggressive mobility; action.  Too, it may call for the action of waiting.  These can be done (are to be done) without the unraveling effect of both careless worry or care-less-ness.

In-tension-al living takes responsibility; hearing from God, noting His call, and acting regardless of reasonable opposition.  Faith is in constant tension.  What is it that we are expected to do which has neither tangible assurance nor visible conviction...Hebrews 11:1? We are to live by faith in-tension-ally.

Some in the church are indifferent.  These have no care about much it seems; just hoping that at last breath there turns out to be a heaven.  The other side of the same ineffective coin is to be one who serves with no joy; no life.  These carry constant fear that we have inadvertently believed error and Hell is one slip-up away.

Jesus would call us to in-tension-al living.  Our striving is to believe him.  Or confidence is to be in his Spirit.  Our faith is filled with assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.  Now this...this is where tension fits; not indifference and not in fear, but in confidence that God runs an entirely new kind of operation.