Yesterday I spoke of “thresholds,” and today when I looked up the etymology of this word, I discovered its roots are Latin and it comes from the word limen. Liminal space is primarily an inner state and only sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in new ways. Liminal space is where we are in between, in transition, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next. It’s not an easy time in our life!
In my own life experience I have often entered liminal space when my former way of being was being challenged or changed by God — when I lost a friendship with a loved one, or when I lost a job, or when I faced an illness, or when experienced the birth of a child, or when I had to face still yet another major relocation. Liminal space has often been for me both a graced time and a painful time, and yet often it did not feel “graced” in any way. In such space, I believe all of us are not certain or in control.
For me, crossing a threshold in my life is a time of vulnerability and openness to the liminal space in my life that allows room for something genuinely new to happen, as painful as that often is. I am often both empty and receptive — feeling like I am a blank tablet waiting for new words and paths to follow, and all from Christ. Liminal space for all of us, I believe, is where we are most teachable, often because we are most humbled. Liminality is prophetic for us, as if God has sent a prophet to hold up a mirror for us to look into, and such a view of ourselves keeps us in an ongoing state of struggling with the hidden side of things rather than searching again for useless ego-confirmation or calling for so-called normalcy into our lives.
It’s no surprise then that we generally avoid liminal space. Much of the work of authentic spirituality and our own human maturation and development is to get ourselves to see that we are into liminal space and that we need to keep ourselves there long enough that we can learn something essential and new. We all need to spend time consciously at these thresholds of our lives, and we need wise friends or spiritual elders to help us hold onto such spaces for us. Liminality is a form of holding the tension between one space and another, an old way of living and a new way that Christ wishes to design for us. It is in these transitional moments of our lives that authentic transformation can happen. Otherwise, it is just business as usual and an eternally boring, sin-filled status quo existence.
Over my lifetime, I’ve seen God lead me through such liminal spaces again and again and again. Without God’s guidance and reframing, I’ve never had a chance of understanding the necessary ebb and flow of my life, the ascents and descents, and the need to embrace my tears and my letting go as well as my successes and triumphs. Without standing on the threshold I am unable to see beyond myself to the broader and more inclusive world that lies before me.
Revelation 3:20 has become, for me, a life-passage from Scripture when I am standing at a threshold: “ Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.”
I know Christ is standing at my door and knocking. Oh Lord, that I would have Your sufficient grace to open the door and take Your hand and cross it!
Too often God has pulled me to show up at the doorway only to rationalize that there is no door to pass through, no conceivable threshold to cross!
I have tended to stuff my ego and anxieties in a box talking myself into the lie that Christ won’t see that I’m in my box when He opens the door to the threshold He wants me to pass through. But Christ isn’t showing up at this point in my life because He wants to see my perfect self, for such a person doesn’t exist. When this experience happens to us all, instead, we are invited into a real, deep, transformative conversation, there on the threshold between who we are and who we can become, if we are willing to let go of what holds us back.
Today pray that we can all let go of what holds us back: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.
From the Bible:
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice” Ephesians 4:31.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” Proverbs 3:5-6.
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” Jeremiah 29:11.
“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” Isaiah 43:18-19.
“Cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” 1 Peter 5:7.
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