I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection:
(1) the world and
(2) the Christian tradition.
I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.
I also found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike: the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself.
The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world — it had evidently been meant to go there — and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me.
–G. K. Chesterton
Have you had the experience of Chesterton where your understanding of God has helped you make better sense of the world and how to live in it yet not be of it?