God: Hidden on Purpose
The first chapter of "Between You and Me"
I used to run alone in the dark, red florescence beaming above my head, crackles of gravel crunching under my feet – straight uphill, careening down. And I found I liked these moments, away from the more blinding glow of faces, away from the repetitions of pain I called life. I would listen to jazz ballads in my earbuds and imagined I was in another kinder world. There would be glimpses of it.
We roller-skated around a circle - an angel of light gracing me with terrifying awe. Her laugh was more like a force than an expression, her eyes were portals. She shifted the time signature of life into a waltz. She told me how fast she could run a 5k. I felt as though I was at the precipice of a new and kinder world. There would be glimpses of it.
We sat under a grey gazebo after a weeklong silence. My tears smashed into the cold metal table. Her hands in mine felt more honest than they were before. She told me I wasn’t going to be the godly husband she wanted. It was true.
Dark tendrils ambushed a throbbing soul, binding my stomach and squeezing upward into what should have been liquid heartbreak, but anger lay waste to sadness.
I had been in the kinder world and now I know it doesn’t exist.
And then I got into biking. But as it turns out after a few months of trying, biking doesn’t make me feel like I’m in utopia either really. And neither does poker or video games, or even serving in church. I was told that obsession with a hobby would at least numb the pain enough to make it manageable, but it actually doesn’t.
So I had this large problem – I thought my ideal world was on the other side of effort, and it just isn’t there. It just doesn’t exist. At least if it was there then I could reverse engineer it. I could figure out a 6-month plan to find utopia in my everyday life, which I would assume includes calorie counting and sitting folded on a towel with my eyes closed. But here’s the thing – it just isn’t there.
A cosmic horror the size of a leviathan emerges from the pacific. If you were to draw it on a globe, you’d see that it would touch each of the coasts. It’s our old friend reality who is always demanding our attention.
You are probably so used to him that you don’t notice him anymore. He’s the guy who tells you to put on deodorant. He’s the guy who makes your hiking trip impossible without an inhaler. He’s the guy who says it really would be better if you clocked out at 5 at this point.
He interrupts your dreams with nightmares.
And he interrupts your nightmares with dreams.
All he asks is you stay awake.
I have asked God where He is a lot. As it turns out, He’s kind of hard to find. He seems to like talking to the Pope I guess, and He definitely likes my pastor, but He doesn’t really talk to me all that much. And He talks to the people who wave flags around in my more charismatic church (otherwise, why would they be doing that?). So those people have obviously found God.
But when it comes to my prayers, it’s a buzzing red fluorescent glow of scorn. It’s almost more exhausting to pray now than it is to handle things myself. At least I don’t have to sustain the offense of no answer, the utter belligerence and neglect of a God – a father even - who I know reportedly cares but actually doesn’t.
And yet we know better, don’t we.
If we’re honest, we know God is -
CS Lewis wrote somewhere that heaven opens up in glimpses and vanishes just as quickly. For me, heaven shows up when I’m washing dishes. It shows up when a summer breeze cools my forehead. It shows up when I’m typing and the song I’ve been listening to for the 12th time changes to a chord that opens into another realm. Yes, I can see the power and majesty of God by looking down from a mountain, but more often, the stuff that I resonate with, the things I think about in the car on my way home are whispers that I hear on ordinary days doing ordinary things.
I’m sure it’s God because the only thing going through my mind while washing dishes is what I will be doing next, or the food I’m going to eat on the plate I’m washing because I ran out of plates and I only have one plate.
The more I think about it, the more clear it is to me that God shows up in my reality more than my dreams. He appears in the girl I matched with on some app that loves Jesus, but unfortunately also loves country music. He appears during the conversation that is clearly awkward but somehow goes on for another 10 minutes. He appears in my real pains, and not my fake ones. I think He’s smart enough to do heart surgery despite my complaints that I want to eat more sugar.
It’s looking like God and reality are good friends.
He’s really there this God, and the reality is that He is inside of my soul. He is a divine mystery this Christ, the Hope of Glory. It would be quite astonishing if, at the moment of salvation, the cosmic reality of conversion became suddenly visible. What would we see? The light and glory of God Himself entering a human? Tendrils of light suffocating our sin nature to death? The author entering the novel?
And yet we find such disconnect, such mundanity, such feelings. Why is this? Why don’t we see such a dramatic experience? Wouldn’t that help the cause of Christ? Wouldn’t the stark reality of a soul being quickened to life be a sight for a sore-eyed world?
The obfuscation makes very little sense the more you think about it. If the reality of our spiritual conversion was made visible as CS Lewis said, we would be tempted to worship each other. We would be led to worship Christ all the more. And imagine the wiping away of tears! The aversion of breakups and death and the obliteration of sadness.
The only reason I can conclude that the God of the universe would hide something so powerful and so utterly transformational is if He intended it to be hidden. I am led to believe that Christ prefers to remain a mystery.
Why would Christ prefer this? Is not Christ’s very intent to have the gospel preached across the entire created order? Why not cause such miracles at such a rate that the evidence would be undeniable. Why not turn every believer into an angel with extraordinary power upon conversion? And cannot God make this so clear while maintaining our free will?
I think He likes this because it makes Himself searchable. He wants His people to find Him, not just yield to His power.
Is this worth it? The pain included in making Himself searchable? God seems to think so. The pain included in making Himself hidden is the cost of love.
Anyone I’ve truly loved – that agape love Jesus lived out – required a search in the hidden places of what is really going on in their heart. An understanding of the true reality of their situation in life. A sort of spiritual humbling that requires going into the trenches and pains of one’s life and hunkering down with them, under the barrage of mortars crashing down around them.
What is the appeal of marriage except that someone not only knows you but loves you too. They know you the most and love you the best. We are all hiding ourselves so we can be found. We are all keeping our secrets close and hoping that someone pulls us offstage and comes home with us, where the bed isn’t made and the garbage still needs to be taken out.
Am I saying that God is hiding secrets? Yes! God is hiding so we can enjoy the search of loving Him, the ongoing discovery of His Life; the hide and seek and find of Life Abundant.
Imagine the alternative. God decides to make Himself immediately visible in front of you. That’s not going to work out very well. You’d probably die immediately, which wouldn’t be good. And also, you’d be utterly terrified. If you loved Him at that point, it really wouldn’t be love, would it? It would be fear masquerading as love, which is no real love after all.
I think I’m starting to get it. All of that searching for that kinder world and all of those empty prayers and all of that hiding that God does is intentional. It’s an intended feature God developed into life, not a bug. Maybe all that resistance and negativity I feel around God is a call to something deeper, not a “do not trespass” sign. Those little phrases, those little encouragements, those small glimpses of it are reality. They are the language of God, His preferred, organic manner of speaking. We know God is talking to us, don’t we? Those supernatural moments happen in the most natural moments, when I’m washing my one plate.
It wasn’t always one plate, but that’s a story for the next chapter. Her chapter. She taught me a whole book, but we’ll see if we can condense it into a chapter.
Yeah… We’ll see if we can do that…
Welcome to Between You and Me. It’s called that because I ask that we keep this between us two. A lot of these things are quite personal, y’know? Wouldn’t want these things floating around on the internet where Christians can whip my words with the Bible, would we?
But it’s also called Between You and Me because there is a lot between me and God. There’s a lot between God and me and all of us, isn’t there? This book is an attempt to name those things so they can be healed. One chapter at a time.
Waylon Woody is a writer and minister living in West Milford, NJ.
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