The glory of God is man fully alive. ~St. Irenaeus
Does God still long to walk with us?
The Way We Were
As is his habit, he arrives first. While we lace up our Nikes, he enjoys the cool evening breeze. We walk beneath towering trees newly planted, beside chanting streams echoing his voice, “It is good, it is good, it is very good.”
How easily our hearts open and the words come. With run-on sentences, our gestures wild and our breath quickening on the hills, we recount the discoveries of the day, and he smiles.
It sounds like babble to us, but he savours the music of humans drinking deeply of life.
We Walked Away
The day of our fatal mistake, he waited as usual, and we hid. Behind the bushes we trembled with emotions new to us. Fear and shame, the inexplicable desire to avoid the love we craved, churned in our bellies. We limped away, our hearts now set on following the dangerous, solitary road of self-will, but God never stopped longing, he never stopped waiting for us to come.
Some of us heard his whisper, “Where are you?” From its first pages to the last, the Bible records the footfalls of those who dared come out of hiding.
- Enoch walked faithfully with God.
- Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.
- When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to him and said, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me faithfully and be blameless.
- I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people.
- Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence, LORD.
- And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
- When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’.
- And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.
Revelation presents a vision of the beautiful end to our story, when “the nations will walk” by the light of the presence of God.
Does God seem distant, aloof to your need? He’s there, he’s waiting to walk with you again.
Genesis 3:8 Genesis 5:24 Genesis 6:9 Genesis 17:1 Leviticus 26:11-12 Psalm 89:15 Micah 6:8 John 8:12 2 John 6 Revelation 21:22-24
Are you keeping him waiting?
Photograph by Kimberly Hanson
