Can We Pause the Game?

“Can we pause the game? I have to go potty.” My three-year-old nephew said it during our game of Chutes & Ladders. When he issued his game pausing request, I froze, dumb struck. He repeated his request. Auntie Laura regained her composure, smiled deeply and said "of course, of course!" And off he went. His softly spoken words had stirred the deepest recesses of my soul. At first I couldn't identify the gold, then it came. “Can we pause the game? I have to go potty,” is the story of my search for Truth.

To elaborate...

When I turned 29 the axis of my world tilted. An early mid-life crisis? The proverbial astrological “Saturn returns?” (For the astrologically disinclined, Saturn is a planet that takes approximately 29 years to return to the same place within one's birth chart, and this planet is considered the taskmaster of one's life.) Numerologists might say I was transitioning from my youth phase into my power phase that takes place in one's late 20's.

In many ways, at 29, I should have been happy by any western definition of "success," yet I could no longer deny or manage an internal longing for something far, far more that was now manifesting as growing discontent, and a return to the questions of my childhood. It was time for a quest of a different sort...to explore the ultimate paradox: why fear and suffering and brutality existed in a world where such experiences should be impossible if God was real.

At 29, I needed to pause the game. I needed a potty break.

That was 1992. Now, at age 46, the quest has deepened and lightened immeasurably. Yet, there is more to be done in remembering there is nothing at all to be done.