Between

"ac hie gesittað be sæm tweonum
oð Egipte incaðeode
land Cananea, leode þine,
freobearn fæder, folca selost."

from Exodus, an Anglo-Saxon poem, circa A.D. 800

[But they sit rooted between the two seas,
On account of Egypt, unbelieving-nation,
On the verge of the Land of Canaan, on account of your people,
Noble-born father, best of the nation.]


BETWEEN: in the space that separates two points or objects.

It comes down from the ancient Anglo-Saxon word betweonum, from BI (by) + tweonum (dative plural of *tweon "two each" [cf. Goth. tweih-nai "two each"]).

The old word "twain" also comes down from the same root. From this Mark Twain took his pen name, since it was the riverboat jargon for "Mark Two" on the depth rope lowered into the river. You may also remember twain used in Rudyard's Kipling's famous poem... "When the East meets the West":

"OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat"

Although between has survived from long ago, its synonym and cousin betwixt is dying a slow death. It comes from Old Teutonic, twiska (meaning two-fold).

We live our lives between many things, don't we?

Family and career, wartime and peacetime, floods and droughts, past and future, heaven and hell... and countless times we have been between our point of embarkation and our destination while we traveled.

I believe that living between is often a journey toward understanding life, through recognizing the contrast of what is on either side of me. It also frees us from trying to define our lives simply in terms of ourselves--a foolish thing--and instead we grow through our experiences of being between. A pregnant mother. A man hired for a job, the day before he starts it. The engagement of a couple. An elderly woman dying on a hospital bed. The moment between inhaling and exhaling.

Yet how silly it would be to want to stay there, like a fly caught in a web. Being between is not really a place (like the "Wood Between the Worlds" in The Magician's Nephew), it's a fleeting piece of time, given to us for a reason. A journey is not all about the experience; the destination matters.

This is how I think about hell and heaven. We are suspended in a dance now between paradise and the inferno; moths between the moon and the flame. What light attracts us? Which passions pull us more... a passion for self-fulfillment which will burn us, or a passion for the glory of God in the face of Christ which will transform us?

Our time spent between is measured in the wing-beats of the seraphim, who cry "holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!" and who urge us to do the same with our own amazing & ordinary lives.