So finally, after
open
and
Both,
we get to
With
and
For
and
Ahead.
I remember years ago hearing someone tell a dramatic story about something incredible that had happened in his life, and the way he summarized what had happened was “. . . and then God showed up!” It was moving to hear how thrilled he was, but I had one of those “Wait—what?” moments soon afterward. If God showed up, then prior to that, was God somewhere else? And if God was somewhere else, and then God came here for that person at that moment, why didn’t God show up for all of those other people in all of those other moments who could have used some showing up?
I’ve encountered this conception of God countless times over the years, a perspective that isn’t as much about who God is as where God is. I’ve heard people pray and ask God to be with them; I’ve heard songs inviting God to come near; I’ve heard a good event described as a God thing—all of these undergirded by the subtle yet powerful belief that God is somewhere else and then comes here to this world from time to time to do God sorts of things.
The problem with this as one’s only conception of God is that it raises endless questions about when and where and why God chooses to act.
Or not act.
I don’t know why the Holocaust happened or why that young girl was abducted or why that uncle got a brain tumor. And neither do you. None of us does. And anybody who can tell you why God decided to come here and act in one instance but not another should not be trusted. Lots of people were given only this particular conception of God at some point in their lives and they’re still living with it: that God is somewhere else and may or may not come here from time to time to do God sorts of things.
Do you see what this leads to?
This conception of God can easily lead people to the notion that life, the world, existence, etc. is perfectly capable of going on without that God. That God becomes, in essence, optional.
That God may or may not exist.
Great effort, then, is often spent trying to prove that that God even exists, which can, of course, fail spectacularly.
There is, I believe, another way to see God, a way in which we see God with us—with us, right here, right now. This isn’t just an idea to me; this is an urgent, passionate, ecstatic invitation to wake up, to see the world as it truly is.
I recently bought some new snorkeling gear, and as I was pulling it out of its packaging a little tube of something fell out. I was so excited to get to the water that I didn’t think anything of that fallen tube as I grabbed the gear and headed out. I got to the beach, put on the fins, adjusted the mask, and made sure the snorkel was firmly attached, and then I dove in, expecting to see the reef below in stunning color and detail.
But I couldn’t.
I could make out shapes and a bit of color, but otherwise my mask wouldn’t stop fogging up. It was then, out in the water, several hundred feet from shore, that I remembered that little tube, which I realized was a special solvent I’d heard about—one you wipe on the mask so that it won’t fog.
Having interacted with literally thousands of people over the years as a pastor, I’ve often felt like my job was to help people discover where they dropped that little tube, because seeing is the first step to pretty much everything.
I want you to see.
Not in a superficial, check-the-box, oh-yeah-now-I-get-it casual sort of way, but in an “Oh dear God, my eyes are finally open” sort of way.
To explore this seeing and what it means for each of us, let’s first go to the dining room table at my friend Rosa’s house. Rosa is Italian and she’s an amazing cook—that’s a bit redundant, isn’t it?—and she makes these huge meals that take hours to eat while her husband John goes back and forth from the kitchen bringing plate after plate of food and inevitably—usually sometime around the first round of dessert—someone will mention how transcendent or out of this world or sublime or divine or glorious the meal has been.
I imagine you’ve had similar experiences that you would use similar words to describe—maybe you were holding a newborn child or hearing a favorite song performed live or standing on the side of a mountain or floating in a lake or even washing dishes on an average day when you became aware of something else going on, something more, something just below the surface of whatever it was you were experiencing—something you’d say was sublime or glorious or transcendent.
Sometimes it’s extreme, adrenaline-inducing moments, like the other day when I was out on the ocean paddling on my board and I heard a sound I’d never heard before. Like a wheezy two-pack-a-day uncle clearing his throat, only louder and lower. More subterranean rumble than cough. As I turned around to see water shooting up from the surface, I realized that I was close—really, really close—to a whale.
So I did what anybody would do in that situation: I paddled closer. (Which my wife Kristen would probably point out is not what most people would do.) My heart was beating furiously like the kick drum in one of those early Metallica songs. As I glided along next to the whale, I was overwhelmed by a sense of what I would call acute smallness. The dark bluish-blackish color of its skin, the sheer volume of water it displaced when it came to the surface, and the size of my board in comparison to its size all conspired to impress upon me:
“You, Rob, are a very, very small being in a very, very large world.”
Other times it isn’t the adrenaline-producing mountaintop and whale moments; it’s the times we’re overwhelmed by depth and intensity of feeling at the other end of the spectrum. I recently went to lunch with a friend at one of my favorite taco places. About twenty minutes into lunch, he began to tell me about the unraveling of his marriage. He told me about their history together and how it got them to this point and what it’s doing to her and what it’s doing to him and what it’s like for him to go grocery shopping and then go back to his new apartment, all alone.
Somewhere in our conversation the full force of what he was saying hit me—divorce, the effect on their kids, the image of both of them at some point taking off their wedding rings. It was as if our interaction up until that point had taken place in my mind, but all of a sudden it dropped with a dull thud down into my heart and I was engulfed by sheer, unadulterated sadness and sorrow that permeated my entire being.
I choked up, right there in my favorite taco place.
There are the highs,
there are the lows,
and then there are the normal, average, everyday moments like washing dishes or making your kids breakfast or walking the dog or giving the neighbor kid a high five when you find yourself catching glimpses, clues, and glances of depth and dimension and fullness.
Sometimes it catches you off guard; sometimes it sneaks up on you from behind; sometimes you find yourself slowing down and becoming gripped with a certain stillness, like your heart is slamming on the brakes while it whispers in your ear, “This matters, this is significant, slow down, pay attention,” like your soul is trying to take a picture because of the realization that whatever’s going on here right now is worth capturing.
When we try to describe these moments and we use words like transcendent and we talk about something being out of this world or about an event as having depth or being sublime, what we’re talking about is our sense that
it is what it is,
but it is also, at the same time,
something more.
It was a meal, but it was more than a meal, in the same way that it was just a conversation, and yet it was more than just a conversation.
You were there, fully present, taking in every tactile dimension of the experience, and yet your visceral, physical experience drew you higher, farther, beyond that very same experience.
It’s as if the present, real-time, flesh-and-blood taste of that meal around Rosa’s table somehow pointed past itself, its vitality and joy an echo of a larger vitality and joy.
In November of 2011, I was walking through the second floor of the Phoenix Art Museum when I came across a massive wall of pink and yellow that appeared to be changing color. As I walked toward it, I began to see that the wall was actually an installation, about fifteen feet tall by thirty feet wide, made entirely of sheets of paper—thousands of them, maybe millions of them, some yellow and some pink, all stacked and arranged with great care and precision to produce this particular effect. It was mesmerizing. So simple and yet so genius. Who does that? Who decides to stack that many sheets in such a precise, intentional order? Who has that kind of patience? And how did the artist know it would produce such an emotional reaction?
It was just a wall of stacked sheets of paper,
and yet it was more than just a wall of stacked sheets of paper,
in the same way that it’s just a song,
and yet it’s more than just a collection of notes, noises, and melodies.
To be as precise as possible, then, I imagine you’re like me in that you regularly find yourself having experiences that point past themselves to a larger reference point, to something or somewhere or sometime or someone beyond the experience itself in its most basic essence.
These moments have a familiar paradox inherent within them, in that they are both
near and far,
close and distant,
right here and yet somewhere else,
all at the same time.
(Have you noticed how often first-time parents speak of being over the moon? What does a tiny infant have to do with outer space?)
Often you can touch these experiences,
hold them,
lean on them,
sing along with them,
breathe them in,
see them in their proximity and nearness,
and yet they have a compelling way of leading you beyond them, as if they were a window or a door into another room.
The ancient Hebrews, it turns out, had a way of talking about these experiences we’ve all had, those moments when we become aware that there’s more going on here, moments when an object or gesture or word or event is what it is and yet points beyond itself.
They believed that everything you and I know to be everything that is exists because of an explosive, expansive, surprising, creative energy that surges through all things, holding everything all together and giving the universe its life and depth and fullness.
They called this cosmic electricity,
this expressed power,
this divine energy,
the ruach of God.
They believed that this divine ruach flows from God because, as the writer says in the Psalms, the whole Earth is God’s, all of it infused with ruach, crammed with restless creative energy, full of unquenchable life force and unending divine vitality, undergirded and electrified by the God who continually renews the face of the Earth.
When the Hebrews talked about the world, then, they didn’t talk about a world that went on day after day doing its thing while they discussed whether or not there was a God out there somewhere who might or might not exist. What they talked about was all of this life and vitality and creativity and stars and rocks and talking and pasta and tears and whales having a singular, common, creative, sustaining source—whom they called God—who powers and energizes and sustains it all.
And that all includes us.
While they understood this ruach energy to be as wide as the universe and powerful enough to fuel and animate and sustain even the stars, as it’s written in the Psalms, they also understood this ruach to be as intimate and personal as the breath you just took and the breath you’re about to take.
In fact, they often referred to ruach as breath, as in the story of Job, where it’s written,
As long as I have life within me,
the ruach of God in my nostrils . . .
The wisdom teacher in Ecclesiastes echoed this understanding in writing that every single one of us is the recipient of this energy and life force and divine breath, given to us by God to sustain us and fill us and enrich us and inspire us and give us life.
We all, the Hebrews insisted—before we do or say or create or accomplish anything—have been given a gift, as close as our breath, as real as life itself.
But breath wasn’t the only way they understood ruach. In many cases they used the word to refer to what we would call spirit, although that word spirit can bring with it a number of associations in our world that the Hebrews didn’t have. In our modern world, many people understand spirit to mean something less real, less tangible, less substantive—something nonphysical, often relegated to the realm of religion. Something that may or may not exist.
But ruach doesn’t divide the world up like that.
In Job God’s ruach garnishes the heavens,
and in the Psalms it’s the ruach that brings things into existence.
When they spoke of the ruach of God, they weren’t talking about something less real; they were talking about what happens when something becomes more real right before your eyes.
When they spoke of ruach, they weren’t talking about an abstract realm somewhere else; they were talking about the giant megaphone parked one millimeter from your ear, announcing to you in clearly pronounced, unmistakable sounds that this is real and it is happening and it is not to be denied or dismissed.
When they spoke of ruach, as the poet does in the first lines of the Bible, they were talking about the very life force that brings everything into existence, the presence of God within the world, dwelling in every created being, present to everyone and everything all the time.
They repeatedly spoke of this presence of God everywhere in all places, events, and beings. As one of the Psalm writers asked,
Where can I go from your spirit,
where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens,
you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths,
you are there . . .
(It’s important to note that the Hebrews were careful not to say that God is the flower or sunset or pasta or lump in the throat—they didn’t say God is creation, because they understood that in giving life to everything, God also gives creation freedom to be whatever it’s going to be, with all of the possibilities and potentials for good and bad and beauty and chaos and love and loss that that freedom might lead to.)
All of which leads me back to the start, to where we began, to the simple, straightforward belief that God is with us.
I believe God is with us,
around us,
beside us,
present with us in every moment.
The question, then,
the art,
the task,
the search,
the challenge,
the invitation is for you and me to become more and more the kind of people who are aware of the divine presence, attuned to the ruach, present to the depths of each and every moment, seeing God in more and more and more people, places, and events, each and every day.
Several thoughts about this seeing.
First, what our experiences of God do at the most primal level of consciousness is jolt us into the affirmation that whatever this is, it matters. This person, place, event, gesture, attitude, action, piece of art, parcel of land, heart, word, moment—it matters.
When my wife Kristen was fifteen, she went on her first date with a guy she knew from school. He came to her house, picked her up, they went to a movie, and then he drove her homeward. Her family lived in the desert at the time, and on the way home, on a remote stretch of road several miles from her house, a drunk driver coming the other way crossed the centerline and hit them head-on. The cars were totaled and Kristen and her date were rushed in an ambulance to the hospital. Her parents, who were called by the first responders, quickly got in their car and headed for the hospital, down the very same road Kristen and her date had just been driving on. Several miles from their house Kristen’s parents saw a commotion up ahead in the road—commotion that they soon realized was due to the car their daughter had been riding in, which hadn’t yet been removed from the road. And so they passed by the smashed relic of a car their daughter had been in moments earlier when she was hit head-on by a drunk driver going way over fifty miles an hour.
My mother-in-law Judie told me that it’s the first time she’d ever seen Kristen’s dad with a tear in his eye.
I tell you this story because Kristen’s father has always loved his daughter, and at any point in her life if you’d asked him if she mattered to him he would have said, “Yes, of course.” I imagine as well that if you’d ever asked him if she could matter any more to him, he would have said, “No, I can’t imagine how.” And yet we can safely assume that in that moment, as he drove by the wreckage of that car with a tear in his eye, his daughter somehow mattered more to him than before.
It’s like there’s a scale from 1 to 10, and you always would have sworn that someone or something mattered to you with a 10. But then you almost (or you actually do) lose her or him or it or them, and suddenly your heart is filled with a 17 or a 39 or a 4,291 kind of mattering. New capacities, ones you didn’t know were possible before, open up inside of you.
Sometimes you realize that something that didn’t seem to matter to you actually does matter, other times something that mattered to you suddenly finds a way to matter even more to you, but every time something within you expands.
The ancient Hebrews had a word for this awareness of the importance of things. They called it kavod. Kavod originally was a business term, referring to the heaviness of something, which was crucial in weights and measures and the maintaining of fairness in transactions. Over time the word began to take on a more figurative meaning, referring to the importance and significance of something.
Kavod is what happens when you’re exchanging the usual “How are yous?” with a person you see regularly, only on this particular day she doesn’t respond with her normal “Fine, and you?” but instead says, “Not good”—and suddenly everything changes. Now you ask her why she isn’t good and she tells you and you quickly find yourself in the midst of her pain and you feel what she’s feeling and you hurt like she hurts and the conversation is no longer brief and shallow like it has been for years, because now it weighs something, it is significant, it matters.
She matters;
you matter;
the fact that she decided to be honest with you matters; the thing that is happening between you matters.
That’s kavod.
Kavod is what happens when you’re trying to talk someone out of suicide and you keep insisting that his life matters. You’re trying to find better ways to explain it and you’re begging and pleading and persuading and doing your best to convince him not to go through with it—and you keep coming back to the conviction you have that life matters, even though that sounds so simple and duh and obvious in the moment.
It’s what happens when you meet up with someone who has just shaved his head and you make a joke about it and he tells you that it’s because a friend of his is going through chemo and his shaved head is a sign of solidarity—and suddenly you’re staring at that shiny head in a whole new way.
That’s kavod.
We live in a lite world—one that bombards us from thousands of directions with advertisements and escape in every conceivable form and television shows about people doing mindless things and elevators that play mind-numbing versions of songs we used to like before we heard them a million times. This noise, in all its visual and psychic forms, can numb us, making this day feel like it’s without weight because it’s just like all the others as they all run together.
But kavod, kavod is something else.
Kavod is serious—not in an overbearing, stilted kind of way but in a sacred, holy kind of way. The word is often used in the scriptures to refer to God’s glory—that which happens when the monotony is pierced, the boredom hijacked, the despair overpowered by your sense that something else is going on, just below the surface, something that’s bigger and wider and deeper and more powerful than anything you could begin to imagine. Something that reminds you of your smallness, frailty, and impermanence. It’s that gut-level awareness you’re seized by that tells you, “Pay attention, because this matters.”
When we’re talking about God, we’re talking about every single one of those moments—whether they’re Earth-shatteringly loud and large or infinitesimally small and whisper-like, mere slivers you inadvertently stumble upon—
moments when you are convinced, even if you’ve been burned and
let down and
betrayed countless times—
that cynicism does not have the last word, that life is not random or meaningless or empty, but that what you do and how you feel and what you say and where you go and what you make of this life you’ve been given matters.
This realization—that things matter—leads us to a second particular response our brushes with ruach provoke within us, one that takes me to a small city in Virginia I recently visited for the first time.
As I drove up to the town square, I noticed that it was crowded with tents full of people who were camping out to protest the growing economic inequality in our country. Later that evening, a number of the protesters came marching through the center of town, shouting and chanting and singing about injustice and poverty and greed and the ways that those things tear at the fabric of our common life together.
Shortly after that I was talking with a friend who had just recently joined a food co-op where participants pay a monthly fee and then receive delivery of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and grains from local farms. She was raving about the quality and freshness of the food and how much less the food had to travel because it was locally sourced and how that cut down on the carbon footprint and how that was teaching her about the farming community that was just a few miles from where she lived.
And then shortly after that, I ran into a young couple who were toting around their newborn son and I did what we all do—I made the obligatory comments about how cute he was and how much he resembled his mom and dad, and then I inevitably grabbed his little hand and held it up and said, “It’s so small!” as if I were surprised.
Why do I always do that? Was I expecting his hand to be large? I bet you do the same thing.
You hold up that hand and you stare at it and you talk about how small it is and what a marvel it is and how you can’t get over the miracle of new life, etc., etc. Why do we do this?
We do this because it’s not just about the baby.
We hold up the baby’s hand and marvel at it because it reconnects us with the wondrous mystery that is our own life.
New life is deeply moving and mysterious
because
all life is deeply moving and mysterious.
We hold that newborn baby’s hand up for the same reason that protesters march and people join food co-ops—because we have an intuitive awareness that everything is ultimately connected to everything else, and I believe that is one more clue to who it is we’re talking about when we talk about God.
How we eat is connected to how we care for the planet which is connected to how we use our resources
which is connected to how many people in the world go to bed hungry every night
which is connected to how food is distributed
which is connected to the massive inequalities in our world between those who have and those who don’t which is connected to how our justice system treats people who use their power and position to make hundreds of millions of dollars while others struggle just to buy groceries
which is connected to how we treat those who don’t have what we have
which is connected to the sanctity and holiness and mystery of our human life and their human life and his little human life
which is why we hold up that baby’s hand and say to the parents, “It’s just so small.”
There’s an ancient Jewish prayer that begins,
Hear, O Israel:
the LORD our God,
the LORD is one.
One is the English translation for the Hebrew word echad, which refers to a unity made up of many parts. The oneness the Shema prayer refers to is important because it makes a clear distinction between God and everything else that exists—preserving the beauty and transcendence and otherness of God while at the same time speaking to our sense that all of the diversity and difference and pulsating creativity we know to be life comes from a common, singular source and center who is one in a way that nothing else is one.
This is one of the reasons we watch movies, attend recovery groups, read memoirs, and sit around campfires telling stories long after the fire has dwindled down to a few glowing embers. It’s written in the Psalms that “deep calls to deep,” which is what happens when you get a glimpse of what someone else has gone through or is currently in the throes of and you find yourself inextricably, mysteriously linked with that person because you have been reminded again of our common humanity and its singular source, the subsurface unity of all things that is ever before us in countless manifestations but requires eyes wide open to see it burst into view.
We live in a dis-integrated culture, in which headlines and opinions and images and sound bites pound us with their fragmented, frantic, isolated blips and squeaks, none of it bound together by any higher unity, coherence, or transcendent reference point.
This fragmentation can easily shape us,
convincing us that things aren’t one.
But when we talk about God, we’re talking about the very straightforward affirmation that everything has a singular, common source and is infinitely, endlessly, deeply connected.
We are involved, all of us.
And it all matters,
and it’s all connected.
All of which leads me to a third particular response to ruach, one that takes me to Long Beach, California, to a TED conference. Each February over a thousand people gather at this conference to listen to some of the brightest, most creative, most innovative people in the world give talks on technology, environment, design, science, and a number of other topics. It’s an extraordinary thing to sit for a week and hear scientists and inventors and writers sharing what they’ve discovered and created and pioneered and achieved in their efforts to make the world a better place.
There’s also an agreement, I’m assuming unspoken, that God and religion aren’t to be acknowledged beyond passing, often apologetic references to spirituality and transcendence. These are, after all, the smartest folks around. What would Jesus have to do with anything they’re doing? (That is an example of sarcasm.)
I tell you all this because at TED 2012 a brilliant, passionate lawyer named Bryan Stevenson gave a talk about injustice and racism. He spoke about his work around the country within the prison and court systems and his desire to see all people treated fairly. He told stories about young men he’s currently defending in court, arguing compellingly for a more just society, and then he closed with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. (who was quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker) about how the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice.
The second Stevenson was done, the audience gave him a rousing, extended standing ovation. Then later, they pitched in collectively to give his organization over a million dollars.
I point this out because when the audience was asked from the stage two days earlier how many of them considered themselves religious, it appeared that only about 2 or 3 percent of the people raised their hands.
And yet a man confronted them with the moral arc of the universe and they intuitively, unanimously, instantly affirmed the truth of his claim.
Is history headed somewhere?
Seriously?
Because when Bryan Stevenson talks about the moral arc of the universe, he’s talking about history, history that is headed somewhere, somewhere good.
History that has a point to it.
I believe that those smart, educated, accomplished, self-described-as-not-very-religious people stood and applauded because deep within every single one of us is the conviction that there is a point to this. That life has purpose. That when we die, the lights are not turned off and the show is not over.
The Greeks had a word for this sense of forward movement, purpose, and direction—they called it telos. The telos of something is its point, its purpose, where it’s headed, what it’s doing, and where it’s going.
This is why we love stories: they’re loaded with telos. They are not static but dynamic realities, heavy with potential and possibility. In a story, something happens, and then something else happens after that, leading somewhere. That’s how stories work.
When we talk about God, we’re talking about that sense you have—however stifled, faint, or repressed it is—that hope is real, that things are headed somewhere, and that that somewhere is good.
That’s the power of a TV show like The Office. Boring meetings and photocopiers that hum in the background and annoying people in the next cubicle—at the deepest level these sorts of settings are a vise on our heart, squeezing us tighter and tighter with the insistence that tomorrow is going to be just like today. It’s the terror of the modern world, the crushing fear behind every day: that it’s going to be like this—just like this—tomorrow and the next day and the next day.
And so a show about a drab and dreary office where the work is mind-numbing and the rewards meaningless—and yet the people stuck in this setting find humanity and laughter and compassion and even meaning—has a really, really powerful effect on its viewers.
When light bursts through,
when our boredom is pierced and our angst hijacked by surprise,
we’re brushing up against ruach—
calling us,
inviting us,
rescuing us,
reminding us that
it all matters,
it’s all connected,
and it’s all headed somewhere.
To wrap up this chapter about the God who is with us, then, a few thoughts.
First, I began this chapter by talking about our very real experiences of this world for a very specific reason: I believe that you are already experiencing the presence of God with you in countless ways every single day. This is why I introduced you to ruach and the idea that God is the source of the very going-on-ness of the universe, like electricity that powers the whole house and everything in it.
There’s a story about Jesus where he’s at a dinner party, reclining at the table with the other guests, when a woman begins pouring perfume on his head. His disciples are outraged because of how expensive the perfume is. Jesus, however, is thrilled, telling them, “She has done a beautiful thing to me.” He then proceeds to tell them that what she’s done is prepare him for burial.
Burial? Here’s the revealing part: in Jesus’s day, preparing someone for burial was a religious act. In Jesus’s eyes, this woman’s gesture is a holy, sacred act of worship. His disciples miss this, seeing only a common, everyday act.
They miss the power and significance of the moment because
they don’t have the eyes to see what’s going on right in front of them.
There is a strong word here in this story for our day: you can be very religious and invoke the name of God and be able to quote lots of verses and be well versed in complicated theological systems and yet not be a person who sees.
It’s one thing to sing about God and recite quotes about God and invoke God’s name; it’s another be aware of the presence in every taste, touch, sound, and embrace.
With Jesus, what we see again and again is that it’s never just a person, or
just a meal, or
just an event,
because there’s always more going on just below the surface.
Jesus sees what others miss.
He is aware when others are oblivious.
I love how the apostle Paul puts it in a letter to friends: “May the eyes of your heart be enlightened.”
Which leads me to a second point, one about faith. Sometimes people who believe in God are referred to as “people of faith.” Which isn’t the whole truth, because everybody has faith.
To believe in God requires faith. To experience this world and its endless surprise and mystery and depth and then emphatically declare that is has no common source, it is not headed somewhere, and it ultimately has no meaning—that takes faith as well.
I tell you this because in the times I found myself in the deepest, darkest places of doubt and despair, it seemed too huge a leap of faith to trust that there is a God who loves and helps and hears and heals. That sounded crazy to me. Depending on where you’re coming from, that kind of faith can seem naive, simple, childish, uninformed, and at times downright stupid.
In those times, believing in God to me seemed like taking a flying leap.
But the truth is, I had already taken a leap, because we’ve all taken a leap. Whatever it is that we believe, whatever it is that we trust, we’ve all leaped and we’re endlessly leaping because we are all people of faith.
Whether you believe that this is all there is
or
we come from outer space
or
you’re a Christian or a Buddhist or you’re Jewish or Jedi
or
you don’t believe that we can know anything for sure, it’s all a form of faith.
Nobody hasn’t leaped.
Which leads me to one more thought about the God who’s with us: choosing to trust that this life matters and we’re all connected and this is all headed somewhere has made my life way, way better.
Or to say it another way, God has made my life better.
I don’t mean this in a shallow, trite, then-I-believed-and-now-I’m-happy-all-the-time way, but in a deep, abiding, satisfying way.
I move more slowly than I used to because I don’t want to miss anything.
I find more and more beauty and meaning in everyday, average moments that I would have missed before.
I need fewer answers because I see more.
I find more people more fascinating than ever because I’m more and more used to being surprised by the mystery that a human being is.
I’ve discovered more and more events are less about the events themselves and more about me being open to whatever it is that’s going on just below the surface.
Because there’s always something more,
something else,
depth and fullness and life,
right there,
all of it a gift from the God who is with us.