Some of the stickiness that I'm experiencing isn't all bad, just so you know. Right now I'm so stuck in Jeremiah that my bible falls open there of its own accord. Last night I'm rereading chapter 15. I'm stuck on this recently:

If you return, then I will restore you--
Before Me you will stand;
and if you extract the precious from the worthless,
you will become My spokesman.
They for their part may turn to you,
but as for you, you must not turn to them

I'm stuck there for purely selfish reasons, I'll admit. I'm trying to look at what seems (feels, is, might be) worthless and extract particles of precious. I'm wrote a poem a few years ago, The Alchemy of Happiness, a few lines pulse through me all today:

Wrought in the bowels of earth,
life veins surprised by progeny,
puddles of metal spooled into gold,
deeply in, heavily crowned

I'm wringing out the bowels of earth these days, picking my face up from the grindstone, making a conscious decision when it would be easier (faster, less painful, lazier) to just passively let earth pass me by. I'm looking for a surprise here, I'm waiting for a surprise, around the next corner if you please. Or not, if you don't.

There are a few notable Ifs in that verse above and I'm mindful of them, I am. I promise. I know the teetering edge on which I stand. Here's the If/Then, and here's another one, and then here's the outcome once you get your silly head out of the worthless and into the precious: you still have to extract, you still have to stand, you still have to not buckle. In other words, the pressure never ends. The alchemist never stops--we're always mixing and matching and trying and failing and never, never, never stopping until we get gold.

I think I have this concept that God gets easier, like college algebra and learning to read--the more we do, the easier it is. But I think I need a new concept, God is not easier, like nothing else I can even compare. He's just a deeper cave to mine.