Chasing God

I can be pretty hard on myself. I see my failures with such clarity, like no one else can. I watch myself, as if through someone else's eyes, riding high on waves of euphoria then plummeting down into the white foam of despair. I feel like a loser. Everyone else seems to have their lives in order and understood. I understand nothing about my life—what doors open and when to go through them. I understand nothing. I run to the Father and feel His comfort and presence then drift back into riding waves again.

I wonder how I can be so close to God one moment and so far from Him the next. How can that be? How can I hear His heartbeat, snuggled against Him, out of sight from the real world, listening to the mysteries of the universe, then wake up not knowing if I'm even saved? What did I do wrong? How do I fall from grace so easily, so quickly?

It has been a pattern in my life that vexes me. As far back as I can remember, I have always bounced in my relationship with God. Mountaintop to valley. I watched mature Christians with awe and respect. They soared in the Spirit. They had visions and wrote of astounding miracles. They kindled the flame with such ease. It wasn't until much later in my adult life that I understood that the masters of faith suffered terribly. I took awkward comfort in knowing that it wasn't always smooth for them either.

It made me think about why that was. If the patriarchs of the Kingdom despaired in their faith, there had to be a reason why. I thought about my own downward progressions and realized two things, I have a will and so does God.

A good percentage of my falling has to do with plain old stupidity. I make stupid decisions and then become shocked at the consequences that I suffer. It takes a while to work back to the source of the unfortunate outcome, but when I get there I am usually quick to acknowledge my own guilt. When I wake up to disappointment because of where I put myself, I know it was my own fault.

But there are a good many other times when I just don't understand why I can't find heaven. There's no GPS, no radar, no Instant Messaging. God not only isn't home, He moved away without leaving a forwarding address. I'm shocked. Why, it was just yesterday that we had such fun together. He was showing me the tiny, tiny little flowers by the hillside trail and whispered His love on a breeze that scattered the brown leaves. We played hide and seek and I found Him inside a planetary nebula, all bluish and cloud-like. Yesterday. Today, I'm alone. I walk through my house not understanding at first. What is this feeling of emptiness? Where did it come from? Why am I so close to tears when nothing bad has happened?

I reach for the Psalms and gorge myself on David's melancholy. I can relate, though I don't know why. And then it comes to me. The hide and seek game isn't over. He's just making it harder to find Him. The further away He hides, the closer to heaven I get when I do find Him. He makes it my choice. If I forget to look for him and wander off to play with my own toys, I become disillusioned and sad. Then I get mad at Him for ignoring me and leaving me alone. But if I remember that He likes to play, I can see Him leaving me breadcrumbs to find Him. Sometimes He hides like a little child who giggles under the bedspread. He makes Himself easy to find, if I remember to look.

God wants us to be developed individuals. He wants us to grow and learn more and more. There's just so much to learn, so much to understand. We think we've arrived and sit back to enjoy the view while God is calling us up the hill. It's easy to forget that we're supposed to be climbing when we have jobs and families and activities to deal with. Plus, we have an enemy who makes it his business to ruin our lives.

There was a reason that the fathers of the Old Testament built altars on places where God touched their lives. Every time they past by, they remembered what He did. We need to do that. We need something that will remind us that God is always calling us up. He's hiding and wants us to seek. He's not punishing us. It's actually supposed to be fun. He loves our delight when we find Him. And when we do, He shows us a little more of Himself, a part of Him that we couldn't see from where we used to be.

I still get depressed because I still forget what's going on sometimes. I think that even if I had a giant alter in the middle of my living room, I'd forget to look at it or run into it and get mad. It's part of the shaping that God is doing in me. He doesn't hide in the same place twice because I've already seen the view from there. I have to remember that! He's very cunning, my Father. I know He's here somewhere, I can hear him giggling.