I like the Walgreen’s slogan: “At the corner of Happy and Healthy!”

I want to live there. At the corner of Happy and Healthy, right off the Peace Freeway and just a stone’s throw from Serenity Circle.

But I don’t.

I live at the corner of Chaos and Confusion.

I’m a cradle, revert Catholic who attends a church that has been vilified and celebrated (both at the same time, and both currently, depending on who you talk to). I work at an evangelical development organization. My family consists of atheists, agnostics, a few practicing Catholics and Protestants, and a few non-practicing Catholics and Protestants. I was, at one time, a wanna-be Jewish person, and I still spend an inordinate amount of time studying Jewish history and reading Jewish literature. My very best friend, aside from my husband, is, well, I actually don’t know what she is. My dad is a Second Amendment Tea Party guy, my deceased stepfather was conservative generally, and my deceased mom liked to swing between crazy radical and irritable traditionalist (or just irritable, depending on the day you talked to her).

At work, I study things like RFRAs (yep, that RFRA…) and pray without crossing myself. I hang out in person and on Facebook with dear friends who are part of the LGBT community. My Twitter is for work mostly and my Facebook is for friends mostly, but I even cross those lines sometimes.

What the heck?

I don’t like to talk politics with anyone because, frankly, it’s none of your business, and it doesn’t help. No conversation I’ve ever had was helped by a discussion of politics. Policy, maybe. But politics? No thanks.

I do like to talk faith, but only if you want to hear it. I abhor the practice of preaching to people who don’t want to hear it as a method of “evangelizing” (“Let’s waste everyone’s time!”) and I think the practice of “light theology” to avoid conflict is not only misguided, but wrong. And preaching hate? It is not only completely useless, it’s sin. Big time.

So this week’s RFRA news, colliding with Holy Week, is, in many ways, just another day in my life.

But it has been disturbing. Sometimes my worlds collide violently.

The question, for me, is this: Do I have a problem to be solved or a tension to be managed?

For me, it’s a tension to be managed. Yes, I can explain why RFRA is probably not a real threat to my gay friends. I can explain to others why those in the LGBT community are true gifts from God. In the end, some will listen, maybe. But, as we all know, it would probably devolve into a battle I can’t win.

If a battle can’t be won, then you have a tension to be managed, not a problem to be solved.

I have to manage the seeming tension between different parts of my life. That means I willfully, and forever, live at the corner of Chaos and Confusion.

Come by sometime. You might meet some people who are different from you that you like. And you might not. But we won’t be talking politics. And there will be beer for the non-evangelicals.

Welcome.