Last night was a short night. A rough night.
And on those short nights, sometimes I have no choice but to get outside to get some air. So I shook myself awake as much as possible, grabbed my blanket and headed for the door.
But sometime during the night, after I had gone to bed, Mark had moved some of the furniture.
You see, he’s into comic books now. Loves them. And so it’s not unusual for him to lay them out so that they cover the living room floor. If you’ve been in our house, our living room is not very big, so to lay them out on the floor, he has to move the coffee table. Only this time, after picking up his comics, he didn’t put the coffee table back where it belongs.
Yep.
So in my haste to get to the front door, and in the eerie darkness of the night, I rammed right into that blasted table, toppled over it, somehow did a triple toe lutz and landed on my side on the floor. In a bit of pain. And managed to wake up Mark, who sleeps in our living room. I’m surprised I didn’t wake up my entire crew. Mark felt terrible about the accident, as he realized what happened, flipped on the light and helped untangle me, my blanket and the coffee table.
This evening, remembering the incident and nursing my bruises, I’m reminded of what at one time was a very important verse to me. The passage is Acts 17:26-28:
as even some of your own poets have said,
“‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
Verse 27 is the verse I want to focus on……..”that {mankind} they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us……..
Sometimes, life feels exactly like this verse. Like I’m “feeling my way toward God”. In the dark. With the furniture moved. Where things that I thought were in place are suddenly someplace different, like the coffee table, and I can’t seem to find Him.
And when those moments come, they are dark moments indeed. Hard moments. And I think, if I put my hand out and keep moving forward, perhaps I will find my way toward God….perhaps I shall find Him. I have found myself in that place as of lately, as I search for God through scripture study. Sometimes the sheer disorientation is enough to paralyze.
And yet.
And yet the verse does not end there. Yes, sometimes this is what it seems to be like….feeling our way toward God in a dark room where the furniture has been moved. But there is something so much more here in this last phrase: “He is actually not far from each one of us.”
Whew. He is actually not far from each one of us. All of us. He is near. Even when we can’t “feel our way toward Him”; He is near. So why can’t we sense His presence? Why does He cause it to be like my tripping over that coffee table in search of the front door?
Maybe because–and I’m guessing here, because I don’t really have the answer–but maybe because we (I) rely too much on my own searching and not enough on faith and trusting, as small–as tiny–as my faith may be. I don’t like to hear that as an answer, but it may be truth.
“In Him we Live and Move and Have our Being”……If this is truth, then outside of Him there is no life. There is no moving. There is no being. Also a difficult lesson. A difficult admission.
If you’ve read my past 3 posts, you know I’ve taken a re-look at Psalm 38. There is a verse in there that I’ll close with that summarizes all of this pondering up, in a simple cry out to God. It’s a verse I used to pray often. It’s a verse that maybe I need to get back to praying again.
Psalm 38:21
