In the middle

One of my favorite Andrée Seu essays of all-time was "Messy in the Middle," about being caught in the middle of a hard situation where no immediate answer could be found.

The reason I liked it so much was because it described exactly the anguish I felt over my family . . . parents who divorced after 29 years, siblings who don't speak to each other, reconciliation nowhere in sight. Since then it's applied to many other situations: Being unemployed, waiting for an editor to write me back, moving away from our home state.

The words of Jimmy Eat World's song, "The Middle," say:

It just takes some time

Little girl you're in the middle of the ride

Everything, everything will be just fine

Everything, everything will be alright, alright

My question is: Will it?

The middle stinks. It's neither here nor there. Your foot can't find the smallest hold, your fingernails the slightest grip. For some inexplicable reason, the light at the end of the tunnel is turned off and you can't see to the left or the right or one inch in front of you.

The middle is a place where reconciliation plays hide-and-seek, an empty place where what's next is unimaginable. You aren't happy together, but you can't live apart. You aren't friends, but can't quite give up hope that you one day will be. You are estranged from your sister, but think about her all the time.

The middle gives me no answers. I wish, like the song says, that I knew being in the middle was followed by everything being all right.

But I don't.

Do you?

Where are your middle places? In the midst of the not knowing, can you find rest, some vestige of peace?

For those of us who are quick to jump in with an I-can-do-it attitude, the middle is especially hard. Give me a problem and I'll tell you what to do, in 10 easy steps. But sometimes 10 or 20 years of messiness convolutes the problem and the answer isn't forthcoming. Sometimes the lesson in the mess isn't how it is fixed, but how it is endured.

On especially middlesome nights, I wonder---is it possible that the middle, the place of festering untended wounds and unanswered questions, is in fact the healing ground? Where the pat and the cliché are abandoned and accepting the not knowing is the lesson of the day?

I'm not sure. The middle has gone on so long I lost sight of shore on either side long ago.

I do wonder if, of all places, God is a God of the middle. If this is where He meets us the best. In the times when we're neither here nor there. Those waiting times where the diagnosis isn't in yet or the house won't sell or the man in charge can't decide if he wants to offer you a job or not. Those times where we have exhausted our own resources and have no choice but to sit in silence . . . and listen.

Lacking a tidy end to this column, that's what I'm going to do now.