I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the LORD; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart.
~ Jeremiah 24:7
This. Right. There. If we but cut out the noise in the world, and tuned in to this whisper. It changes everything.
I felt it as a child. Moments of the touch of grace. In the spaces… in the pauses… in the empty. The promise of something… but what I couldn’t hear.
What I knew with certainty was that it was different than everything else. How could I live it, I couldn’t know.
But, it was there, always there… softly… quietly… like a flutter… a touch… of another living voice.
It felt like both something inside me, and somehow also in the spaces around me.
I felt it in the longing to know it, to understand it, to feel it… in the wanting for it to live me.
You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.
~ Psalm 63:1
When the new age philosophies captured my attention, I thought God was there. I fell for the promises, the lure of transformation and transcendence. But, nothing was real or sustaining. The promises were just that… promises that kept being broken… always in the tomorrow… that never comes.
I grew tired of the false promises… of the never-ending cycles of the sun, the moon, the stars, which I gave my power to… in the name of ascension.
I longed for something real… something sustaining… something that would fill me up day after day.
After so many years, two decades of these empty promises, when Jesus began to call for me it was confusing. Head shaking confusing. Yet, I felt His urgency. He wanted me. He wouldn’t give up. He wouldn’t leave me in the empty another day.
When I finally arrived… when I finally landed in His Church, in His Body I wanted to fall to my knees. His presence so filling… so over-filling it wracked me with sobs.
The beauty so immense. It stirred memories of moments of this grace… what my whole life longing amounted to… that space inside me that wanted to be lived.
The longing that lacked a name.
Lacked comprehension.
Blocked by the every dayness of living… and not listening.
The Holy.
Many months later, studying scripture, miraculous blessings upon blessings through the power of prayer and grace, baptism… the living waters… singing worship songs still threaten to overflow in a fountain of tears.
My beautiful sister-in-law and sister-in-Christ standing beside me, takes my hand tightly and whispers, “I can feel God’s Presence… here… with… us.”
The child in me remembers. YES.
That’s IT. The sudden realization. It’s God’s Presence… that I feel in those moments.
His ever loving… ever faithful… Presence.
I vow to remember. Always remember. Forever and ever.
“O beloved, why has not Love sufficiently overwhelmed you and engulfed you in her abyss? Alas! when Love is so sweet, why do you not fall deep into her? And why do you not touch God deeply enough in the abyss of his Nature, which is so unfathomable? Sweet love, give yourself for Love’s sake fully to God in love.” ~ Hadewijch, 13th-century Belgian Beguine poet and mystic
Not my strength. But His.
Not my will. But His.
Ever deeper into this Love.
Nothing less.
