In 2026: Giving Attention to the Goodness of Tension

What grabs our attention? Things that move. Sights and sounds. Colors and clanging. Smells and textures. Our senses are continuously overwhelmed. As we begin to travel through 2026, I want to draw our attention to attention and to the necessary tensions dancing with our attentions.

Decades ago during my first year of teaching, I had one student who was described as what would come to be termed as ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder (and then later labeled ADHD).1 We tried to keep candy bars out of his school day diet. I believe he loved Snicker bars. Sugar hyped him, distracting him from his work. He became disruptive.

Related to ADD is TDD.

She gives her attention to the beauty of the view and the freshness of the breeze.

“TDD? What’s that?” you ask.

Well, it’s not a clinical diagnosis. It’s a term coined by a theologian and some of his theological friends to describe a characteristic he and they observed in Christians of every stripe over time. According to Peter Kurowski, TDD is Tension Deficit Disorder, which describes a malady of extremes where “one truth from the Bible is pressed excessively at the expense of a balancing truth” 2

I summarize and define his term this way:

TDD is the lack of attention given to the necessary tension existing between balancing truths. 

How can we avoid TDD? What is its opposite?

Practicing the opposite of this observed behavior should help us better understand the Bible, our personal lives, and our broken world. What would the opposite of TDD be?   TOO?

If TDD is a disorder, then TOO is an order. Order. If TDD lacks attention, then TOO provides attention through sustained observation. Observation. If TDD is about relating truths to each other by holding a hand of each of them in ours, then TDD embraces the necessity and virtue of the resulting tension. Tension.

TOO is Tension Observation Order.

TOO is a properly ordered (organized) vision (observation) that looks both ways before drawing conclusions (recognizing balancing realities that together are more fully truthful). “Look both ways before crossing the street,” our mothers often chided us in their worry for our safety.

For example, if we focus solely on one attribute of God, His sovereignty (His Will will prevail), then we may mistakenly feel like objects or pawns on His chess board. We may despair, because in our hearts we know we are more than objects or machines, so we long for the more that actually is there. Paradoxically, it is in His sovereignty that God gifts us with personal agency, free will: the divine gift of consciousness, thought, desire, and decision-making, designed so we can love God fully.  Look both ways: He is sovereign (the Lord) and we reflect or image Him as “homo sapiens” (wise or knowing humans), though currently His image is broken within us, yet the pieces are still there. It is our agency (ability to think and choose) that makes us responsible to God. He desires relationship with us. I am not a breath-lacking brick. “Shall we sin that grace may abound? God forbid!” (Romans 6:1-2). In His sovereignty, we have choices.

This is just one example, and I can only touch on it here. I’m sure it would not be hard for you to make a long list of balancing truths that look like paradoxes or antinomies.

Kurowski notes that orthodox teaching (that which lines up with Scripture) lines up paradoxical truths from Genesis through Revelation. The orthodox is paradox.  At the heart of the Word is the gospel, the good news, containing both the bad and the good. God is transcendent (beyond us) yet imminent (near to us). Christ is both fully God and fully man. The cross exhibits extreme evil and surrender, while it portrays glorious love and victory.  Christ died that I might live. “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” “The first shall be last.” We discover that truths are never isolated but are nestled within the contexts of other truths, some of which seem contrary but provide fullness and wholeness.

Paul and I are now in Florida for the winter. Here in The Villages we like to walk along the boardwalk at Lake Sumter. Pensively, we sit on a bench, giving attention the sea gull, giving its attention to the beauty of God’s handiwork. Paradox:                                                                  This is the breezy stillness of worship.

TDD versus TOO is not just a theological issue. What is sound doctrine? Tension denying or tension observing patterns of thinking and living can also describe our daily experience. What is healthy, Christian growth?

What great harm we do when our sound doctrine does not birth virtue within us, evident through us daily. This is where Kurouski’s theme becomes a useful tool to help us assess ourselves (observation) and grow wiser (order). How can my life be eternally meaningful if I don’t increasingly learn to love and serve God and the people around me?

TOO: Tension Observation Order: to order my life by patiently observing a fuller picture of God, myself, and others and to live out that order.

“Give me an example, please.”

Okay. How do I view and apply grace. Grace. Charis (the Greek term).

TDD: I may see grace (human grace) as acceptance and affirmation, helping to make relationships smooth and calm; to be gracious.  I may view God’s grace as His free gift of forgiveness, the overlooking of wrongs, accepting people as they are (Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you are saved through faith; it is the free gift of God, not of works…). God’s gift of grace to me enables me to offer such grace to others. We observe some truth points here. Yet, some such version of this accepts grace undiscerningly, without the need for justice (the righting of wrongs).

TOO: I see grace as an expression of His goodness and holiness in which God provides what I need: forgiveness based upon justice (Christ paid the price for my sin), which I need to accept or embrace. Grace is extended through the gift of justice: “God made His who knew no sin to become sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Grace is viewed via TDD without the balancing truth of the necessity of Christ’s work for us on the cross. It is a premature grace, a flattened grace, thus not a true grace. When I offer this grace to others, I do not offer them the whole gospel (the good and bad news and how we really must respond to it).

A TOO version of grace will enable me to balance the kindness of truth with the clarity of truth. TOO holds hands with both the grace of respectful gentleness  and the grace of honestly clear truth given to the best of one’s ability.

TOO leans on the Holy Spirit to provide me with a humility and patience I don’t naturally possess. TDD permits ego and irritation to surface, because I am unwilling to explore more viewpoints than the one side I am fixated upon. I want others to focus only on what I see. I am not teachable.

You can develop this one example so much more fully, but it gives you an idea.

As we move through 2026, God is offering us time to “grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18). As we pray, as we think, as we relate to neighbors and family members who view many things differently than we, can we ask the Lord for patience to help us observe His thoughts more carefully, adjusting our own accordingly? Can we listen more intently to the views of others, respectfully and kindly adding our own in thoughtful doses? Can we become more aware of our own TDD and purposefully lean toward TOO?

No truth is an island unto itself. Truth is a family of realities, each point living in relation to the others. The result is a necessary and good tension to which we need to give our attention. This is a healthy tension. Health is wholeness, not partness. Here is the irony, another paradox: embracing true tension graces us with the wholeness of shalom, true peace.    Yes, giving our attention to this tension leads to peace.

A peaceful TOO to you.

…….

1. While characteristics of ADD and ADHD were recognized centuries earlier, ADD and ADHD were not included in diagnostic tools until the 1980’s. Interesting.
2. Peter Kurowski, The Seduction of Extremes with the subtitle, Swallowing Camels and Straining Gnats (St. Louis, Mzo, 2007). Kurowski, a Missouri Synod Lutheran, deals with biblical paradoxes in the OT and NT narratives and then with theological paradoxes arousing conflicting views among Christians (regarding issues of eschatology, Israel, life after death, hell, and ecclesiology in nineteen, concise chapters). Some of his topics are useful studies, but the book is specifically angled for Lutherans. No matter, the biblical principle of paradox is a part of a sound, biblical hermeneutic.