Just this past year I came across a passage in one of Eugene Peterson’s books.
He writes: “…I was twenty years old, home from college for the summer, and feeling a bit foolish with an unnameable discontent that was taking up more and more room inside me.”
Rather than reading “unnameable” discontent, my mind read “unamendable” and in that one sentence I felt all the foolishess of which he speaks, and all the wondering of what it might be. I miss-read the sentence. But I saw the word I had wanted to see and read a sentence I had wanted to write though didn’t know how to do it.
I’ve lived a good portion of my adulthood with some level of “unnameable” discontent and the foolishness that comes along with it. I now see the discontent as the other side of the hope I have for the world and the hope I have for how it is that Christ is making things right again, not least in my own broken soul. The other side of hope is discontent because a hope deferred makes the heart sick and a longing fulfilled is life everlasting. My thoughts about the things I read and experience often have a tempered excitement that can betray the true joy that something really is because I have a tendancy to view things through a lense of what “could be” rather than what is. I’m overly optimistic about the future and overtly pessimistic about the present. Whether this is personality or sickness in my soul, i’m not sure, but it is what it is. Unamendable or Unnameable…either one works most of the time and anytime one throws a healthy hope in the mix, one is bound to find that feeling of foolishness crouching at the door.
