In his new book The Familiar Stranger, Tyler Staton reminds us to walk through life as the two on Emmaus should have — actively looking for Jesus presence in places and times we’d least expect.
Staton:
“We tend to miss God in our midst, not because he’s too extraordinary but because he’s too ordinary. We tend to look for God in the wind, earthquake, and fire rather than the whisper….. what if you know him not just as the table in the evening but all the way along the road to Emmaus?”
To dovetail off his point on looking for God only in dramatic moments (whether the natural or spiritual fires and winds we endure), think about this: If you look at the most primitive, pagan religions, you see this nearly universal phenomenon of seeing gods in storms, fire, creation, destruction. All these dramatic things.
And in a way, you could say our experiential Christianity is not much more advanced.
Although we might not have a god of the storm, fire, or fertility, we retain this primitive, restrained capacity for only experiencing and finding him in those moments.
That’s not bad, of course, because he’s in all that too.
But that tendency is almost just a monotheistic advance on what the ancient pagans were doing. Instead of making many gods from the dramatic, we now try to make sense of our God in the dramatic.
But there’s also a recurring theme throughout both the Old and New Testament of finding God in ordinary moments, in whispers, and — in fact — not finding him at all, which is the dark breeding ground for Psalms.
Which is much truer to the human experience. A God we notice only in the dramas of our life isn’t a God who’s relational, but one who’s sensational — it’s an IMAX god.
But you and I crave for the God of the everyday, and what’s associated with the every day? Our family. So we want the Father who holds us, the brother who listens to us, the Spirit who prays for us and fills us when we run dry, the lover of our soul who’ll listen to us for hours and hours and loves us because he loves us.
In short, a God we talk to, and who talks to us.
Staton gets at that this way:
“Maybe God whispers because it’s the only way he can get what he wants most, what was lost in Eden: to walk with you and me in familiar intimacy that we might know God as he truly is and discover ourselves as we truly are in his presence.”
At first, it’s hard to look for God everywhere, but over time, you’ll find him anywhere. Usually.
That’s why Jesus told us to keep knocking and looking and we’ll find.
The truth is that most of us familiar with the darkness of our disease have also heard God’s whisper break through it in a way we can’t describe, but the truth is also that many, many times, we won’t hear that whisper.
Those are the toughest times. When we keep knocking and no one seems to be home. So how do we get inside to the home we long for?
But it’s in those times outside, that we have to keep, keep knocking and praying and begging, and whether you can hear God’s answer or not, he has already spoken and if you simply look at a cross for a few minutes, it will say: “This is is how much I love you.”
Of course, I’d be disingenuous to say that will always rouse us. The conditions we have are physical diseases of the brain and part of the “wonderfully made” is also the “fearfully made” and it’s hard to a get a handle on ourselves.
So the best we can do is the best we can do — keep looking for God, and also if we can’t hear or find him, maybe it’s because we’re lost in a disease of our mind, and it’s time to talk to a doctor about whether we need medical help.
But we can never stop the spiritual component, we can never stop knocking, because sometimes, when we least expect, he’ll open the door, whisper back, and you’ll walk into his presence and experience a sacred joy. We lost the easy conversation and full communion in Eden, but we’ll occasionally find something beautiful of it here, and once we’re home, well then, that’s what home is.
If you struggle with depression, anxiety, or any other such disorders — for readers in the United States…
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.
For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.
