He is here

So much of what I'm feeling and thinking recently has to do with where I am throughout the day. Of course, when I'm at home, I'm thinking about being at school, and when I'm at school, I can't wait to get home. That's just part of who we are as humans - we can't quite grasp the present, can't quite see things the way they really are.


I just read a great post on The Good Book Blog called, "Hello, My Name Is YHWH." (It's a great site, by the way.) The author of the post, Kenneth Way, refers to an article he read himself about what the
  Name YHWH means with regard to the account of Moses and the burning bush. You'll have to read it yourself, but its basic conclusion is that God was trying to tell Moses, and through Moses the Hebrews, that he was WITH them. Instead of "I AM who I AM," we should read something like, "I AM present where/when I AM present."

And isn't this the core of what we long for, the thing Adam and Eve had and lost, the very thing we will do when all creation is remade? That is, walk with him "in the cool of the day." That's the supreme promise we hear over and again; Jeremiah, Isaiah, Micah, John (should I list them all?), they all foretell of how he is and, soon, how he will be with us. He is Immanuel.

There's another piece of this that keeps calling out to me. Every night, when I'm sitting with my son waiting for him to sleep, I think back to my own boyhood, and I remember what it was like to fear the night. I didn't know what it was, which made it that much more powerful, but I knew its feeling; the quiet dark spread itself over me like the blankets I was in, and with it came something deeper - a longing that played itself out mostly in the form of despair. Yes, I know my son feels it too. He doesn't want to sleep because he's rolling around with the same pitted stomach, the same desperation of the unknown.

And what does he need? He needs to know that I'll be there when he wakes up. It doesn't matter what I might DO, nor does it matter what he might do, if I am there - it only matters that I am present.

Oh, how I want to be there all the time with both my sons. Yet the way things are now, it is not possible. But somewhere I hear a voice say, "...it was not that way from the beginning." Just like we were meant to walk with the One who created us, we were meant to walk in a much more meaningful way with one another.

That's been lost.

One day, one day soon, we will all walk with him. All our longings will be met, no more to be mixed with the empty night-despair; we will wake to a newness unimaginable.

Reflect on that, and be where he is - even now.