show up in tension

So I am finished with UnChristian and Blue like jazz. I feel challenged about where my eyes and heart are set after reading them. If I could only choose one word to describe the feeling that these books launched me into, it would be tension. I have been teaching my students for the last year and a half that we are made to live in tension. That the forces of our sinful desire and the promise of Jesus are pulling at us, that Chaos and Peace are at war and we are the prize. I don't know if they've heard me at least they are polite and knod or laugh when I make a joke in between my thoughts on tension. The truth is we do exist in tension, as Rob Bell has put it we were not made to live as Angels (or the Divine) or Animals (or the Profane), because of our sin we are thrust into the middle between promise and chaos.
About 5 or 6 years ago there was a tv show that only lasted one season. I am pretty sure my pop and I were the only one who watched it, but it was on ESPN and it was called "Playmakers." This was when ESPN was trying to become more then just a sports reporting news network (experiment was a failure). This show however dealt with the day in and day out goings on of a fictional professional football team. It showed the moral ambiguity that existed in the lives of the players. It was a fun show and since I spent the majority of my childhood building football teams on madden football (I believe I averaged 20 or so a month, I had a short attention span). Anyway there is a scene in a certain episode where a player knows he is outmatched and he will be beaten over and over again by a certain player. He stayed in the locker room as his team left to go play the second half. His coach comes over to him and ask's him what is up (it had just come out that the coach had prostate cancer in this episode as well and was having his first chemo after the game). The player asks him "how do you do it? How do go up against something that is so much bigger then you? With all of the odds that are stacked up against you, how do you handle that?" The coach response to him was "you know guys like you and me all, the poor slubs that we are, all we can do is to just keep showing up."
It was so simple and yet when I heard it floored me. All I was asked to do in the fight for my soul was to keep showing up. To not give up the fight, but to relish in the fact that I was apart of this saga, this story since Adam and Eve were deceived.

Those were all of my thoughts at the time at least.

CJ-Out