Turning away

November 21, 2008 | By Mark | Add a Comment

It’s the middle of the night and my little niece is ferociously screaming. I’m thinking again how there are so many grown up people ferociously screaming, it’s just all muffled on the inside and called depression. As the little one misses the Garden of Eden, I’m thinking about how difficult and uncomfortable it must be for a father to hear those fierce cries.

I’m also thinking about a famous son crying out on a cross in order to bring Eden back, and what it must have done to his own father. In time, the son will dry my internal and external tears even though he didn’t have anyone to dry his own. Still, I’m sure the father was up in heaven weeping just the same.

How deep the Father’s love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only son
And make a wretch His treasure

How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the chosen One,
Bring many sons to glory

Behold the Man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice,
Call out among the scoffers

Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom

Category: Musings

Random Quote

Secrets in the Dark
I believe that we know much more about God than we admit that we know, than perhaps we altogether know that we know. God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference.

Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness – a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.

– Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark

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