Those who are sensitive to the tensions within life have always been saddled with the job of reconciling two competing currents within human experience.

One current is vital, dynamic, moving, and restless: it is the spontaneous, palpable vitality of nature. Here we experience the irrational, sometimes upheaving movement of nature toward birth and growth. On this side of life humanness throbs with needs for explosive release of energy, impulsiveness, and ecstacy.

The other current is thoughtful, orderly, controlled, and rational. In it we experience the need for discipline, the desire to keep things in order and to mold raw life into shapes and forms designed by our minds. Here we want to keep vitality under control; here we discipline our impulses; here we fence in the restless drives that rise from the energy cells of life.

Lewis B. Smedes

Professor emeritus of theology and integration
Fuller Theological Seminary