I like this image for its symbolic value – being held by a hand. It is a tiny reminder to me of the hand of the living, eternal God that is infintely bigger than me and able to hold me.
For years I have gone to bed at night thanking God for the everlasting arms that are beneath me. I also quote the lines below from Martyn-Lloyd Jones almost every night. The realization that I am a day closer to home allows me to go to sleep with joy.
Here in the body pent,
Absent from Him I roam,
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent
A day's march nearer home.
Those words become sweeter as each year goes by. I often speak them to God by changing the word Him to You. Not every night is naturally joyful, of course. There are nights when I add these words from Zephaniah 3:17, “he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing” and reword them as a request to God.
You may wonder why I am sharing so personally in a public blog. I do it because I believe there are people who crave and need the intimacy with God the Father that is available to those of us who are His children and we are invited to it. Maybe there are others who enjoy this intimacy but could use a reminder today that they are being held by an everlasting, loving Father.
In this new year I have had people dear to me who have died and others who are actively dying now. The comfort I have felt is in knowing that those leaving know the Lord Jesus and will be with him.
Others I know are entering unknown but difficult paths of different kinds of separation. Those of us who are left can walk beside them, offer the touch of Jesus through our hands and arms and through our presence.
While moving my books around recently, I picked up one written 50 years ago that I have had in my library almost that long. The title is Loneliness by Robert Weiss. He wrote that there is very little research and writing on the subject of loneliness and hoped that his book would encourage other social scientists to write on the subject. I paged through my copy to see what I had underlined many years ago.
Picking here and there I found these things worthy of reflection even as I think about intimacy with God. Loneliness is an experience of relational insufficiency, particularly an intimate relationship of knowing you are known and understood without having to explain. There is trust in that kind of relationship and the sense of knowing the other as well.
Our lonely self is tense, restless, unable to concentrate, driven. I know that self, although I sometimes deny it is my “real” self.
Loneliness is not the product of being alone; one can be lonely in a group. It is the absense of an intimate relationship.
Weiss writes, “our problem in estimating the prevalence of loneliness is that loneliness is not a condition like a broken leg, which one has or doesn’t have, but it is nearer to fatigue, a condition that can vary from the barely perceptible to the overwhelming. How much loneliness must one feel for it to be counted?”
In Ecclesiastes we read that God has planted eternity in the human heart. We are made for a relationship with God, which we know through Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh. While God is physically absent and invisible to our physical eye and inaudible to our physical ear, we see him and hear him in his Word. And he sees and hears us.
One of the beauties of this relationship to me is that we are not equals. He is Creator and I am creature. He is father and I am child. His love is perfect and mine is not. He is never changing and I am always changing. When I understand these roles, I can grow in the relationship.
I never have to wonder where he is or how he feels about me. I never have to fear rejection or separation or abandonment. Human intimacy is wonderful and we need intimate relationships with others but it has none of these guarantees and cannot be compared.
This morning as I got ready for another day’s march toward home, I was reminded “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Being held by God is a comforting experience at at any age.