Part 3 Seven Parables For A Plastic Soul

Where scripture becomes seed, paradox becomes doorway, and story becomes surgery for the soul.
Seven weeks. Seven lessons. One nervous system reborn.

Part 3: The Thorn, Meeting God in Contradiction

Gethsemane: Where Certainty Breaks Open

In the garden, the One who knew all things knelt and trembled.

The One who told His disciples, “Let not your heart be troubled,” confessed that His own soul was “exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.”

The One who promised, “My yoke is easy,” bowed under a cup too heavy for words.

At the center of the gospel we do not find tidy resolution. We do not find perfect composure. We find a God who falls on His face in the dirt, overwhelmed, asking if there is another way.

Here, in Gethsemane, we meet holy contradiction.

Gethsemane, The Pressing Place

Few people realize that the word Gethsemane means “the olive press,” the place where fruit is crushed under increasing weight until the oil flows. Jesus did not enter a random garden on the night of His greatest sorrow. He stepped into the pressing place, the place where weight is added layer by layer until what is deepest is revealed.

His suffering followed the pattern of the press itself. Pressure, then greater pressure, then the final unbearable weight that produces something precious.

Gethsemane teaches that holy contradiction is a kind of pressing. It does not destroy what is true in us. It forces it out. Under pressure, the seed cracks. Under pressure, the mind rewires. Under pressure, the soul discovers what it actually loves.

Nothing essential is lost. Something essential is released.

This is not failure or doubt in the shallow sense. It is the place where love and terror, trust and dread, obedience and agony collide in one heart.

The thorn presses against the seed, doing the necessary work of cracking the shell so something new and larger can grow.

Contradiction is not the enemy of revelation. It is often the beginning of it.

The Necessity of Contradiction

Scripture does not hide contradiction. It puts it in the spotlight, as if to say, “This is where God does serious work.”

Jacob wrestles through the night and walks away both blessed and limping.

Job cries out for answers to heaven’s silence, and instead of a neat explanation he is met with a whirlwind that opens his soul to awe.

Abraham is told that all nations will be blessed through Isaac, then commanded to offer that same son upon an altar. Promise and command collide so violently that only God can resolve it.

The disciples follow Jesus in bewilderment. They are confused by parables, frightened by storms, baffled by the cross, and only later does the risen Christ open their minds to understand.

Pressed in Liberty Jail, Joseph Smith received revelation that broke open earlier assumptions and reshaped the dispensation from triumph into refinement.

And above all, Jesus in Gethsemane, where perfect love and the full weight of what that love would cost meet without relief.

Contradiction is not a mistake in the revelation. It is often the mechanism of revelation. The thorn is the point at which the seed meets resistance, and that resistance is what makes it split open.

Destructive Confusion and Divine Contradiction

Not every kind of confusion is holy. Some confusion accuses. Some shames. Some collapses the heart inward and eats away at trust.

Divine contradiction has a different feel.

It stretches the soul, but does not snap it.
It wounds, but does not humiliate.
It removes illusions, but does not remove hope.
It invites deeper trust, instead of demanding quick answers.
It draws us toward God, even when we cannot explain what He is doing.

The thorn wounds, but only to make room.

Holy contradiction does not blur truth. It enlarges the vessel that truth must enter.

The Brain at the Thorn: Prediction Error and Plasticity

Here is where science agrees with scripture.

The brain rewires most intensely when its current map fails. Neuroscientists call this a prediction error.

A prediction error happens when what you expected does not occur, or when reality refuses to fit your previous understanding. In that moment:

attention spikes
the brain sends strong signals that say, “Pay attention, this matters”
plasticity increases, the brain becomes more ready to change
old pathways begin to weaken
new connections start to form

Spiritually, this is the thorn.

It is the moment when your old map of God and the world cannot carry the weight of your lived experience, not because God has failed, but because your map was too small.

Contradiction breaks the shell so that the seed can germinate. The discomfort is real, but it is also the opportunity for a deeper, truer pattern to be written into the mind and heart.

Choosing the Thorn

Many people today are discovering that voluntarily stepping into controlled discomfort can train both body and brain to handle deeper pressures with greater strength and clarity.

Practices like intense exercise, cold exposure, or breathwork can trigger adaptive stress responses. Brief, chosen challenges can increase neuroplasticity and strengthen emotional regulation by teaching the nervous system that discomfort does not always signal danger.

Over time, deliberate discomfort reframes difficulty as opportunity rather than threat, cultivating the very capacity required to sit with holy contradiction without collapsing or rushing to false resolution.

By choosing small thorns, we train the nervous system to remain open through larger ones, allowing the seed to crack and new life to emerge.

The Shelves of the Soul

Many people try to crush contradiction by forcing a quick answer, or by shoving it out of sight. One breaks the soul. The other numbs it.

A gentler way is the one my husband describes. He talks about placing confusing things on shelves, not to ignore them, but to hold them with respect.

Some shelves are low, where questions get handled often. Some are high, where harder things live until the heart grows tall enough to reach. Some boxes are opened every month. Some sit untouched for years.

Every so often you pull a box down. You sort a little. You understand a little. Something that made no sense six years ago suddenly has a soft edge. A knot loosens. A thread lines up with a new experience or a scripture you had no capacity for before.

The shelves remind us that unresolved does not mean abandoned, and mysterious does not mean wrong. It simply means the soul is still growing into the height required to see clearly.

The shelves give the brain time to form new pathways for understanding what the old pathways could not carry.

Why God Teaches This Way

Why would God allow His children to experience such wrenching tensions instead of handing out simple answers from the beginning?

It is not because He delights in confusion.

Rather, it is because a limited vessel cannot receive unlimited truth. A rigid, finished, unexamined framework cannot hold the wideness of God.

Jesus spoke of new wine and old wineskins. Pouring new wine into an inflexible old skin only makes both break. The wineskin must be made new, or at least greatly stretched, for the wine to be preserved.

Paradox works like that. It does not destroy truth. It breaks the tight, small container we tried to hold truth in, so that a larger one can be given.

Every prophet, every honest disciple, every person who has truly come to know God has been brought to this place. The place where what they thought they knew had to break open before something deeper could be born.

Paradox is not the opposite of truth. It is the doorway to greater truth.

Summary of Part Three

Contradiction is not spiritual failure. It is often the mechanism God uses to enlarge us.
Divine tension stretches, humbles, and invites. Destructive confusion shames and collapses.
Neuroplasticity thrives on prediction error, the very discomfort of holy contradiction.
Paradox breaks old wineskins so that greater truth can be received.
The thorn wounds, but only to make room for more life.

Practice

This week, choose one place of honest tension in your life, one teaching, one experience, or one unanswered question that does not yet fit.

Do not rush to resolve it. Do not explain it away. Do not escape the discomfort.

Sit with it. Notice what stretches. Notice what resists. Notice where the thorn presses.

Maybe ask God, “What old shell might be cracking so that something larger can grow?”

Some truths arrive before we are tall enough to see them. The shelves of the soul hold those questions until grace gives us height.

Music Break

“Neptune” by Sleeping at Last does not resolve. It lingers in the middle space, where the seed cracks underground and nothing looks finished.

Let the trembling parts speak. Let the ache have a voice. Let questions breathe without forcing them to behave.

There is a moment in the song where the soul wants to love God but does not yet know how. This is not failure. It is the most honest moment in spiritual growth, longing instead of certainty, surrender instead of mastery.

When the music lifts its white flag, remember: surrender is not the end of the journey. It is the moment the wind finally has permission to carry you.

You do not need to understand everything yet. You only need to remain open through the breaking. The new shape comes after.

Coming in Part Four: The Yoke

In Part Four we will enter three paradoxes that Jesus gave us: the first shall be last, whoever loses their life will find it, and in weakness His strength is made perfect.

These are not slogans, but invitations into a different way of being. We will look at how living inside these paradoxes, instead of trying to solve them from a distance, slowly rewires desire itself.

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