I’m really terrible at self-promotion, and it makes me feel slimy to place any spiritual significance on my own writing, but today’s specific piece in my Advent devotional is exactly where I am right now, and maybe where you are too, so I wanted to share. I’ve been kind of grumpy lately, even if I put on a good “Christmas Holiday Spirit” show, snowman sweater and all. Kind of like gift-wrapped underwear. So here’s to losing gravity.
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“My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I find no rest.”
Psalm 22:2
We thought we knew what it meant to be desolate. We thought exile from the garden was the very bottom of our fall. We thought we knew the darkness.
But we have not felt such a void as this. We did not know God’s presence was the only thing that tempered us.
So we ask to hear the stories again. We ask to hear about our ancestors who walked and talked with God. We ask to hear how Moses saw God with his own eyes and the glory turned his hair white as fresh snow. We ask to hear how Isaiah’s lips burned with the purifying fire of heaven. We ask to hear about the great King David, how he chased after God imperfectly but with passion.
These stories bring us closer to home than we have been our whole lives. We know, with every drop of blood in our bodies, something is not quite right, not quite whole. When we are most aware, we feel the outcast, the foreignness of where we are. We know, somewhere quiet and deep down, we are in a strange and dying land, a land for which we were not made.
We feel the absence of God in an ineloquent way, a way we cannot quite place. Where once there was a pull between who we are and who we are meant to be, there is nothing. Our identity is tangled up, not in God, but in the rules he gave us generations ago. We no longer feel the draw of the bits of God within us, pulling us toward the maker.
We have lost our sense of gravity.
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