I know some people who hear from God all the time. It's like they've tapped into some hotline or something. I envy them. I am still on cans and string if frequency of communication is any measure. It takes a lot to get through to me, and this retreat I'm on is no exception.
I hardly ever get a "direct" word from on high. Mostly it is just an overall "sense" of things that cause me to move in a certain direction, which is either affirmed or thwarted according to its accuracy. Some would call that conviction or "leading." I wouldn't dare put a title to it for fear of glorifying the wrong thing and causing others to fend for themselves in my primitive world. Unique to me maybe, but effective over the years and as recently as this morning, when after one of my top five prayers—Lord, help me to see what I need to see—I had one of those overarching "sense" moments. It was about my need to be known and God's provision for it.
"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart" (Jeremiah 1:5).
I have made it a habit to memorize Scripture right before falling asleep and when I run. Some of those passages I've made into rhythmic chants that mimic my cadence. This morning as I ran in the rain, that one came back to me, and a little part of the riddle found rest.
In a purely spiritual sense, I am known. In the most intimate sense of the word know, I am known and have been since before I took my first breath. God's response to my cry to "be known" is that he does. He knows me. He knows me better than I could ever know myself. And, of course, God—knowing the realist that I am—
knows I need to understand how this all plays out in my life, like where the "legs" are on these concepts.
After 45 minutes of off-kilter jogging in uneven sand, I plopped down on a sheared ledge at the shoreline. The tide was fully in, and the ledge I settled on was stately but not strong. It was formed only last night. I poked holes in the crispy upper layer as I had my next primal epiphany: God was already attempting to meet my relational needs—I just wasn't letting him.
Names, situations, attempts for relationship that I spurned or—worse yet—dismissed presented themselves like witnesses at a trial. There were people already in my life who were part of God's provision for me, yet I did not have eyes to see them because they were not presenting themselves in a form I expected.
I expected.
I expected the answer to my needs to come in the form of one person, a husband, who would bring an extended family. One relationship, one man to fill all my needs? And in the meantime, while I am waiting on whatever, I am not recognizing or receiving God's provision in these areas.
The church in Acts came to mind. People—as in plural—providing for people. Community. Bound together by circumstance perhaps—something we view as a detriment in this day and age, a weakness almost. We are raised to be emancipated, to seclude ourselves from one another in order to limit our exposure to one another. I wonder if it is a thinly veiled attempt to escape the "iron sharpening iron" process that occurs naturally when, due to mutual dependence or survival, you can't just walk out the door. This expectation of striking out on one's own can be destructive to community, both familial and extended.
It's a shame we don't live more centrically, with our families closer in. We need their wisdom and their "knowing"—the sense of being known by someone who has known us all our lives. And that is just the obvious example. Most of us don't have our grandparents, our extended family near us. That is the fact, but then there is the promise: that God will set the solitary in families. Fact or promise?
The promise is what I mull over as I slide down the front of the cliff to walk the moist edge of the receding tide. My feet sink deep as I remember people like Keith, who commandeered me off the subway in New York after church one afternoon. There at the station's descending entry, he grabbed my arm for at least the fourth
