Unreachable

Have many times known the handiwork of my having severed myself from God by letting fear or distrust creep in. Have all too often experienced a sadness which could have been averted had I only been staying closely beside Him --

“Deep is the soul, is the space I control
Is the one thing I can call as mine
Deeper the cold when He's far from my soul…”
~ “Under the Floor”/Switchfoot

Yet what makes me marvel, in those moments of chill, is not the vacuum which seems to yawn between my soul and His presence, but the way there is still within a pressing hunger. When nothing in me could bridge that span, there swells, in a desperate waiting, the hopeful anticipation that I will be “reached” by Him:

“You will call, and I will answer You;
You will long for the work of Your hands” (Job 14:15).

The gracious moment is in the wait, when we discover that He is unreachable to us, and we must bow down in utter helplessness. The purest gift is in His letting us see ourselves as we truly are: vulnerable, and entirely dependent, because it is only then that we understand what it is to be the ‘work of His hands…’

…that we are fashioned by His will (Revelation 4:11),
…that we belong to Him (Ephesians 2:10), and
…that we are never to be forsaken (Psalm 138:8).

It is in that introspective moment, when we see ourselves without our blinding pretenses, that we recognize ourselves to be weak, in need; ‘wholly incomplete’ apart from Him. Only then can we appreciate that the void we know is a fuller definition of who we are without Him.

And yet, the even greater grace is that He hasn't left us ambivalently wandering in the darkness we’d chosen, but instead, has poured into us a reciprocal longing. Rather than letting the desire for our restoration reside exclusively in His Being, He has let us also partake of that will, lending our clinging souls the avenue by which we permit Him to inhabit us again: an insatiable hunger to be called by Him, and to see His presence returned to us.

Holy God, who will not relinquish ‘the work of His hands,’ has granted us a restlessness which drives us to Him, a longing from which our souls cannot escape. When we are incapable of bringing Him back to us, still He has left within us the deeply-rooted utterance which, renewed in His coming, cries out most passionately to Him, “We have waited for You eagerly; Your Name, even Your memory, is the desire of our souls” (Isaiah 26:8)!