Chapter 4
Embracing God’s Nearness
Someone reached out to me after a particularly painful and unjust event. She said that her inner world felt like a “five–alarm fire” and she wasn’t sure she could go on. And then she wrote in all capital letters: “WHERE IS GOD?”
There is a constant refrain in Scripture that goes a little something like this:
do not fear, for I am with you,
do not be afraid, for I am your God. (Isaiah 41:10)
The refrain, found time and again, is “I am with you.” Remember what the father said to his elder son, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Luke 15:31).
I am with you. You are with me.
God doesn’t go away.
One psalmist puts it like this:
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you (Psalm 139:7–12).
God doesn’t go away.
Even the old theologians say this: God is omnipresent, or always present. God is here, even if it doesn’t feel like God is here.
This is why the cross is at the center of the Christian faith. If I were designing a new faith, I might think of a more effective marketing technique with a more compelling symbol—symbols that convey victory or leadership or courage. But our symbol is one that conveys God’s solidarity in the midst of suffering. God doesn’t watch from a distance. God, in Jesus, suffered with us, for us. God is here, not in spite of suffering but in the particularities of your suffering.
So, why does it feel to us like God is absent?
The reality is that it is not God who goes away, it is we who go away. When primary fear becomes secondary anxiety, we can quickly become dissociative. That’s a sophisticated way of saying that we protect ourselves; we escape. Often, this happens automatically. In the short run, our body’s capacity to numb or escape might serve us, but to heal we’ve got to get back in touch with the primary emotion.
When we go away, we forget. We disconnect. We psychologically dis–member ourselves. This is why some people’s anxiety is felt in their guts, other people’s anxiety in their heads, and still others in their necks and backs. When it goes underground, who knows where it will pop up. Anxiety becomes a game of whack–a–mole. We do our best to address whatever symptom rises up.
If we dis–member, Scripture provides a way forward—we must re–member. Re–member. This is why it is important to tell your story, to re–connect the disparate dots of your life. Psychologists didn’t invent this. It is ancient wisdom. When God rescued his people from slavery, he commanded them to remember, to tell the story, to keep it on their lips and in their hearts. And each feast day of the Jewish calendar featured a different aspect of this re–membering of past trauma and oppression and of divine intervention. Christians do this work of remembering every time we take the Lord’s Supper.
Maybe you’ve experienced something like this. I worked with a man whose father was a raging alcoholic. Now fifty years old himself, he was a devoted Christian, father, and director of a thriving after–school program. He came to me complaining of persistent anxiety, and we quickly discovered that he never feels as if he’s doing enough. He’s won awards for his community development work, and he’s impacted young people for two decades. But it’s never enough.
When I asked him about his relationship with Jesus, he said, “I’m a Christian” but reported that God felt far away. I wondered how he experienced God, if he ever heard God speaking to him in any way, even a whisper. He said, “Chuck, all I hear is God saying that I’ve got to work harder, impact more people.” He sighed, head bowed in a posture of resignation.
“I don’t think that’s God’s voice… it’s a very critical voice within you,” I said. “That’s your Dad’s voice within you, echoing even today.”
He was defensive. “My Dad was a good man,” he fired back. “He did his best.”
I didn’t push. But in the weeks after, I began to chip away at his one–sided narrative. I didn’t want to demonize his father. I’m sure there were many good things about him. But I was also convinced his Dad’s alcohol–induced fits of rage were lodged deeply in this man’s being, serving as a major obstacle to God’s deeper and kinder voice within. I wanted him to remember not for the sake of demonizing, but as a way of re–organizing his inner life, taking inventory of the primary emotions buried away.
And then the day came when he remembered a terrifying encounter. He said,
Dad was sloppy drunk that night. He walked into the middle of Mom’s Bible study, and started saying the most misogynistic things—that they shouldn’t be studying and should be listening to their husbands, that the world would be a better place with women who laid down rather than rising up. Stuff about feminism. He was a jumbled mess, slurring his words. After a back–and–forth with my humiliated and embarrassed Mom, he went looking for his keys, hoping for an escape. But—and I had completely forgotten this—I took them. That was the deal. When Dad is drunk, I take the keys. That was my mother’s plea. And so he came into my bedroom. I remember him looking at me with disgust. “Such a worthless piece of crap” he said, as he looked at me. And then he went to grab the keys. I reached out and our hands met, and he pulled so hard that a key gashed the side of my hand from my wrist to my middle finger. He ran out, and I went to sleep with my bloody hand. No one ever spoke of it.
When he finished the story, he showed me the scar. He had forgotten about it. In fact, his wife of twenty–five years didn’t know about it. And as he sat quietly massaging the scar from wrist to finger, he rocked back and forth. I got up and sat next to him on the couch. Within a few seconds, he buried his head in my chest and wept forty years worth of tears.
A few weeks later he commented, “I came to you for pastoral counseling because I was anxious. I didn’t think I’d find all of this. But I feel such a sense of relief and—I’m scared to even say it—joy!”
I asked, “Where is God in this?”
Placing his right hand over his heart, he looked at me, tears welling up in his eyes, unable to speak.
Fortunately, we have that repeated refrain to remind us.
do not fear, for I am with you,
do not be afraid, for I am your God. (Isaiah 41:10)
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