The Paradox AND
A Christmas Reflection on Living Between Opposing Truths
If you like, you can listen to me read this blog here:
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about a small but important word: and.
Two things can be true at once, and often are.
It keeps showing up everywhere, in caring for my mum, in therapy, in my faith, and especially as Christmas draws closer. It turns out that a great deal of life is lived not in choosing one truth over another, but in learning to stand between them.
I keep coming back to a picture: a tent held upright only when its guy ropes are pulled in opposite directions. Without that tension, it collapses. The structure doesn’t stand despite the pull; it stands because of it.
Sometimes I wish life worked differently. But the older I get, the more I realise: if the tension isn’t a mistake, it’s the structure that holds me upright.
The personal tension: privilege and heartbreak, strength and exhaustion
Caring for my mum has sharpened this truth more than anything else.
It is a privilege — one I would never trade — and it is breaking me open.
I am grateful to still have her, to sit by her, to advocate for her, to know her so intimately in this season. And I am tired in ways I don’t quite know how to name. I am both strong and stretched thin. I am both certain about what she needs and confused by how to navigate systems that seem to change shape whenever I approach them.
There are days when the pull in both directions feels like too much, and yet that same pull is the very thing that keeps me grounded in love.
Therapy: when truth stings and saves at the same time
Therapy is another place where my opposites meet.
I don’t like truth when it first arrives. Honestly, I sometimes hate it. It can feel like being scraped raw. But I do love what truth makes possible, the beginnings of healing, growth, clarity, freedom.
I can sit in a session feeling upset by what I’m realising and simultaneously grateful that I am finally seeing it.
It is horrible and hopeful.
It is disorientating and illuminating.
Faith often sits in that same tension, belief and confusion tied together like two ropes pulling in opposite directions. That, too, is a kind of stability.
Christmas: the holy contradictions at the centre of the story
The more I’ve reflected, the more I’ve realised that the Christmas story itself is built on these sacred tensions. Christmas has always been a story of contradiction carried inside a human body.
Let me stay with three of them.
Majesty and poverty
A king born in a stable.
Royalty wrapped in rags.
Heaven touching earth in a feeding trough.
This is majesty and poverty, not one cancelling the other out, but both insisting on being true.
Fear and favour
Mary hearing, “Do not be afraid,” which only makes sense because she had every reason to be terrified.
A young woman entrusted with something glorious and overwhelming.
Tenderness and terror intertwined.
Divinity and vulnerability
God becoming a baby who needed feeding and changing and carrying.
The all-powerful entering the world utterly dependent on human hands.
The nativity holds opposite truths without flinching. It doesn’t tidy them up; it invites us to sit with them.
Other tensions that shape our days
As I’ve paid attention, I’ve started to notice how these contradictions run through my own ordinary life:
Being held and holding others.
Wanting rest and wanting to show up.
Feeling fierce love and feeling overwhelmed.
Longing for clarity and sitting with not-knowing.
Tenderness and terror, often in the very same breath.
Life doesn’t seem to ask us to choose; it asks us to learn how to stand in the middle.
Learning to stand in the space between
As I look at caring for Mum, at the work I’m doing in therapy, and at the story carried through this season, I keep circling back to the same quiet truth:
Life is full of paradoxes — and the invitation is not to solve them, but to live inside them.
Christmas, perhaps more than any other moment in the year, reminds me of this. A manger that holds both majesty and mess. A girl who carries both fear and favour. A newborn who is both divine and vulnerable. It is a story stitched together entirely from opposing truths, and somehow that doesn’t weaken it; it strengthens it. It becomes more real, not less.
And maybe that’s true of us as well.
We are held and we hold others.
We are confused and faithful.
Tender and afraid.
Hurting and healing.
Exhausted and devoted.
Two things can be true at once, and often are.
I’m learning — slowly — to let the paradox stand without rushing to tidy it up. To allow the opposing ropes of my life to pull without assuming something has gone wrong. To trust that the tension is what keeps the structure upright.
This Christmas, I want to make space for that:
for the hard and the holy,
for the ache and the joy,
for the truth that stings and the truth that sets free.
Perhaps the paradox is not a problem to fix, but a place to stand, a small stretch of holy ground where light and shadow learn to belong together.
And maybe that is the quiet gift of the season:
That in the middle of all our contradictions, we are not alone.
We are accompanied.
We are steadied.
We are loved.
In this season, I’ve found a Christian song that has been quietly steadying me. If you share my faith, it may offer something to you too; and if you don’t, you might simply be curious to listen: I Belong To Jesus.