Give thanks to the God of heaven, for his steadfast love endures forever. Psalm 136:26

                When I let go of the rigidity of our everyday world and then, allowing the stillness to lure me to other places, I am sometimes in that warm, shadowy room upstairs in Nana’s house in Middlesboro, Kentucky. There is a window on my right as I lie there on the bed. The softness of damp air spills into the room in the early morning and a warm, dry heat on a summer’s mid-afternoon.

This was the upstairs room in my grandmother’s house where I slept during visits. I was nearly four years-old there in that room where I experienced such immense comfort—not merely physical but a deep sense of internal security as well. That one room in particular wrapped me in warmth and the jittery, excited taste of the presence that I encountered during my alone times in Harlan and now was so powerfully here with me in my grandmother’s house.

                My sister, Jeanie, and I would play a game following afternoon naps in that room. One of us would spin the world globe that sat on a small desk while the other held a forefinger lightly above the surface, touching ever so slightly. The one spinning the globe would chant, “Round and round and round she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows.”

This was probably some chant that emerged from barkers at carnivals where hundreds of the gullible have stood, feet in sawdust, out in the night, mesmerized by lights and calliope whistles and clowns. Some guy smiling and strutting gives you three-chances-for-a-quarter to knock down bottles or spin a wheel, or topple cardboard rabbits with cork shot from a popgun. Something like that.

                But I would be fascinated to look at the surface my finger touched when the globe stopped. Sometimes it was the ocean. That was not much fun. But many times it would be what seemed to be an exotic area far away in some dark region of Africa or perhaps Egypt or magical Switzerland.

               

                Easing gently into this other world, this other time, though, is when I most notably sense God’s presence, and within that world I am reminded of special moments such as the ones at my grandmother’s house in Middlesboro, among the many others. The memory of them simply wraps around me. The common denominator is this—they all have a sense of security, peace, and love at their center.

                Here is where I began to understand the idea of God’s love for each one of us. God’s love is so much more than the prissy weakness many associate with Christianity. It is powerfully there. Begun, perhaps, in the security we feel as infants and children when we are fortunate enough to have unconditional love from parents and family. That is how it was begun, certainly, for me. Perhaps as this presence—God—initially has crept up to me and begun to coax me toward him, he has used the wonderful love and peace I experienced as a child.

I was fortunate to have two amazing, loving grandmothers deeply committed to God. That is not to mention my incredible mother, who was always fascinated with the idea that we can communicate with God.

Any of us can, and it is really the essence of the Holy Bible—what it ultimately teaches. Whatever we might acknowledge –or not—God really is near us, just as the Bible assures us.

There are some who believe those of us who desperately seek a connection with God are weak and desperate to find solace and relief from the agonies of the world that confronts us with its responsibilities and dangers. However, our need for God stretches far beyond this. And besides, it is not weakness to cry out in the midst of desperation, even as King David in the biblical Psalms. Unquestionably courageous in battle, a man among men, he was aware of God and in many of these beautiful Psalms yearns for God and asks for protection.

Yes, we are in a dangerous world, even at the best of times. It is a signature of human existence. Once there were predators that literally snuck toward us as we lay hidden in some warm shelter, a nest filled with the scent of our pelts, the exhalations of our breathing, and hidden as best we could would be the precious offspring, so new and dependent upon us. Even now, we exist among frets and dangers, death and heartache, anxiety and a quest for survival so much part of our daily routine that we scarcely pause to think. It is etched deeply into the most primal parts, deeply it goes, grasping our very genetic materials, intricately engraved across our DNA.

Our desperate need for God goes far beyond some brittle, cowering need for protection or legends to help us feel better about death which stalks us or the mystery of what there is after death. Perhaps this is one of the great secrets. And I am quite certain that part of the aching, awful tragedy for the ones who shunned God in life will be the horrible realization after death that it’s all true. Everything that resonates through the Holy Bible—is true, and that what they presumed was weakness and desperation of fools who needed protection is actually the living, quietly breathing reality of something so immense and beyond us that we have scarcely even begun to fathom the implications for who we are and what we are becoming.

How terrible to experience the intense, sudden realization—all in a moment—that you literally wasted the time given to us on this planet, in this world, and likely have forfeited the ability to continue.

But I do believe we would do well—very well, indeed—to begin with those warm, precious moments when we have felt most secure, loved and protected, as first steps in understanding the immensity of God’s love for each of us. It is powerfully there, though it confounds our reason that there could be the maker of the Universe and all that is within it, a presence so profound and beyond us and yet so desperate for an intimate relationship with each one of us.

Though it surpasses human understanding, it is nevertheless true. And it is high time that we acknowledge this in our own moment in history and begin again to seriously pursue a genuine quest for this and all that is promised. Presently, we are so awkwardly in darkness and so confounded and confused, and yet we are ready for an amazing transformation that will propel us with renewed zest and wonder toward all that God is waiting for us to come toward at long last.