Finding God where we are…

We spend a lot of time walking down paths on which God seems distant. This sense of separation from God can grow and continue. Days become weeks, weeks turn into months, and months become years. And in all of it we can live without any tangible sense that God is present. In that hard, empty loneliness of time, we can grow to despise life and location. But if we genuinely believe that God is eternal, omniscient and omnipresent, shouldn’t we know that there is absolutely no place where we are ever apart from God? David was a man like us, experiencing trials like us. But he had the good sense to confess,        

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.”  (Ps. 139:7–10)

 Wherever we are, however we feel, God is right there. But the temptation we face in the hard time is that if we would just go somewhere else—Tulsa, New York, this church, that monastery, wherever—then things would change and we would find God. We think that if we were just different, that if we changed jobs, spouses, houses, schools, careers, that then we would find intimacy with God. But these temptations are lies. God is here, there, wherever we are, right now.

 Our challenge is to find God where we are—in the place we live, in the family or community in which we reside, in the church we attend, in the work we do, in the time we spend. God does not walk together with open sin, but He is as near as a cry of repentance. If there is sin, repent. Otherwise, He is there.

 To find God where we are we must intentionally look for Him and expect to see Him; we must listen and expect to hear. We must take our eyes off the distractions of self and unplug from the cacophony of the world, but we need not move or change our church, life or location. He is there!

 Stop, turn, and look. Behold the smallest of things; He is there. Look at the majesty overhead; He is there. Look at the people surrounding you; He is there. Look at what you set your hands to; He is there. Let us find Him in our lives, where we are. He is there!

Losing time…

I walked into a local grocery on New Year’s Eve to pick up the fixings to my annual treat of black-eyed peas and hog jowls (yes, believe it or not that’s a tradition with me, but the how and why is for another time perhaps!). I was just beginning to experience the symptoms of a flu that has only recently lifted its grip from my body, so I wasn’t interested in doing anything other than acquiring the staples. But as I walked in the door something caught my eye and shocked me to a standstill: the display case at the store entrance was filled with… Valentine’s candies and gifts? Why, wasn’t it only yesterday that that same display was stocked with chocolate Santas? How is it that stores now bring February 14^th forward to New Year’s Eve! No wonder time seems to be passing by at an alarming rate.

 Back in October I had penned a quick blog entry bemoaning the display of Christmas items before Halloween, but I just couldn’t figure out why it alarmed me. After all, Christmas has been moved forward every year of my life, so there’s nothing new about that. And besides, after one reaches a certain point on life’s timeline, its easy to think that the speed with which time passes is just a symptom of increasing age. Surely we all know that mathematical explanation for why a year for a fifty year old disappears faster than it does for a ten year old! But the speed at which time seems to be moving these days leaves me to feel that I’ve reached the age of those folks mentioned in the early chapters of Genesis! But the alarm bells rang loudly when this rush to market the next big shopping day confronted me.

 What is happening to our appreciation of time? It appears that the great Leviathan of Consumerism has swallowed it completely. God once promised, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen 8:22). Yet consumerism challenges this promise of God. Grocery stores display our mastery of seedtime and harvest—fresh blueberries in February, apples in June, and tomatoes year-round put to lie the idea of a limited growing season. Electricity sabotages day and night—there is light 24/7/365, which so confuses our internal clocks that insomnia is epidemic, sleeping tablets are the third most prescribed medicine and exhaustion is normal. And as for summer and winter, well, in North America at least, we don’t even have to have seasonal wardrobes; most of the buildings are so warm we can wear shorts year-round if we so desire.

 I may not understand what is happening, but I’m sure it is making us less human. As the merchants of Babylon marshal these technologies, we lose time. And by losing time, we lose our relationship to the creation and its rhythms of life. We become creatures driven by marketing impulse, unappreciative of silence, incapable of waiting, and unable just to be. Life loses perspective; our concepts of past and future are impoverished, and we live exclusively in the moment. What this portends for humanity, for culture, and for history, I can only wonder with fear.

 It might be impossible to do—and hopelessly naïve to desire—but I just want to get off this manufactured ride. I want to plunge a spade deep into the earth and plant a seed and tend it to fruition. I want to greet the sun and watch it set; I want to have to bundle up in winter and sit still in the shade of a summer tree. I want to disengage from this artificial hurry-scurry and encounter the Living God who set the sun and moon and stars in their orbits to be for signs and seasons and for days and years. I want to recover life and its fullness of time. I want to enter in to now, a now fully informed by an appreciation of the past and a hope of a future. Christmas in October? Valentine’s Day in January? Fall merchandised in spring, and summer in winter? These are perversions of life with profound—if as yet still unseen—consequences. Let us as people of God recapture an appreciation of time. Time is a gift, given us by God. Let us enter into its rhythms; enjoy its duration and live. Now.