The Intro
I’ve always been incessantly curious about being human.
As a child learning to read, I loved stories about people. I loved dreaming about who I could be, or who I could create and write about myself.
When I turned 11, I started journaling. If I romanticized this, I’d say I waxed poetic about the pubescent experience of adolescence. If I were honest, I’d say I brainstormed snarky comebacks so that I would be armed and ready if someone were to sass me. (One of these was taught to me by my babysitter: “Talk to the elbow because the hand wants to slap you.”
Yikes.)
In high school, I could hardly wait to take Psychology 12. I was an inconsistent student, but you bet your bottom dollar that I gave all my effort in that class. I was going to solve the problem of existence! (Update: I did not solve the problem of existence.)
As my faith grew, I developed a curiosity about the intersection between theology and psychology. I saw this interplay between the common denominators of our existence: our humanity and God’s divinity.
A lot of this grew because I experienced suffering, and the well-meaning but trite suggestion of “just give it to God and you’ll feel better” didn’t serve me. I couldn’t help but wonder if by denying our human experience we were actually missing something, if our aggressive hunt for joy was actually cutting ourselves off from all that God has for us.
And so, life went on. A bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in counselling psychology under my belt and a lot of time spent in therapy and in mentorship and in relationship, this I know for sure:
I know nothing.
We love to think we can figure it out, that somehow God created us with the capacity to understand His plan in fullness. But certainty is not a path of discovery; it’s a jail cell. The second we find certainty is the moment we lose our humility.
Tess Guinnery has a beautiful, single-line poem and it goes like this:
“I’m building my life on the World’s Greatest Mystery - The only sure thing I know.”
So this, right here, is The Human Space. It’s a place of discovery, of learning what it means to be humans created by the Divine living in a broken and beautiful world. Together we’ll explore, putting words to existence that will inevitably fall short. But they’ll be meaningful anyhow, because that’s what life is.
Welcome to the journey. I’m glad you’re here.