A God Who Wants You To Be Found

by Jean Fleming

I taught a fourth-grade class of underachievers, discipline problems, and low abilites. I loved those kids and yearned for them to know something better than the dark clouds building on their horizons.  I was told that one boy and his brother stole bikes and their father helped them paint them to disguise their appearance.  Another boy came to school tired because his mother’s boyfriend was sleeping off a drinking binge on his bed. There was anger and frustration in many that stemmed from repeated failure.  Those who wanted something better had to fight their way clear of peers who sneered at honest attempts to learn.

I was young, enthusiastic, and idealistic- a quavering combination- and totally unprepared for what I found in that fourth-grade classroom.  I came enthusiastic with ideas to enrich their world and learning, but found enough resistance to severely curtail my soaring.  With wings clipped I mourned over my class. I ached, literally. I lost weight. I slept poorly. I anguished as I evaluated and reevaluated each day's class. I searched myself, the material, and my students for some clue to clear the impasse.

The anguish I felt did not grow from trauma to my personal ambition as their teacher, but from the portent, all heavy and black, accumulating above their heads. I feared the best of life would elude them, not only as fourth graders, but in all of time and eternity.

When I read the Old Testament phrase, "Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you" (Is. 30:18), I recognized something of the pained yearning I felt. The word "longs" holds in tension both the desire to do them good and the frustration of having hands securely tied by their resistance. 

I hear the same frustration in Jesus' words, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Mt. 23:37).

I knew something of stretching out hen wings, of calling needy chicks and watching them turn and mince and peck at the edge of the precipice. My students were full of longing, too, but their longings and mine ran on seemingly parallel tracks – within sight of one another but never to meet. 

I longed and did what I could. My heart was raw and tender, my dreams rebuffed.  I would seek again, tomorrow, some new expression, some innovative plan, some fresh enterprise, to span the gap between their longings and mine.

God’s Longing

Who can deny that the human race is universally beset with yearning?  The astonishing revelation comes when another longing surpasses our own, surging past us with trembling velocity.  God doesn’t turn His back on our longings in indifference; His longings- a greater, graver, holier yearning than anything we know- unfurl in solemn invitation.

His longing, unlike ours, emanates from a selfless love, not from any need on His part.  God is complete in Himself.  But when He created people, He opened a door of pain and longing.

Dame Julian, a 14thcentury contemplative, said that just as God is a God of compassion and pity, He is a God of thirst and longing. I think she is right.

In an amazing display of longing, God takes the initiative to make Himself known. He must. He is invisible, infinite, eternal, and divine. Humanity can know nothing of Him apart from His gracious selfrevelation. He demonstrates the enormity of His love and longing in the Herculean lengths to which He goes to make Himself known.

Years ago, when my friend Louise would visit, my husband would sometimes entertain her threeyearold son, Kerry. Roger explained the game Hide and Seek to, Kerry. But as soon as Roger called, "Here I come," Kerry would jump out from behind the couch. "Here I am!" Kerry would shout as he leaped into view, his arms flung exuberantly overhead.

At first Roger tried to explain to Kerry that he must stay hidden until found. But finally, and wisely, Roger concluded that Kerry had grasped the true objective of the game. The joy is not in hiding but in finding and being found.

God says, "I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me; I was found by those who did not seek me. To a nation that did not call on my name, I said, ‘Here am I, here am I.’ All day long I have held out my hand to an obstinate people, who walk in ways not good, pursuing their own imaginations” (Is. 65:1-2). 

I see the Lord standing there, like Kerry, with outstretched arms: "Here I am. There is joy in finding me and my joy is in being, found." As far as I can tell, everywhere God is jumping out from behind couches in selfrevelation.

God’s Self-revelation

This morning the moon, in full glory, hangs over the Rockies. I sit at my bedroom window in semidarkness and watch the mistcloaked sphere through the window screen. As the moon drops lower, the surrounding haze that softens its edges falls away, and sharp, clean, cold lines form against a mattegray sky. Gradually a gentle pervading pink tints the scant, slanting clouds over the mountains. I've seen photos of men walking on the moon, but I can't believe it was this same moon. Not this mysterious, pallid ball, so remote and untouchable.

I come downstairs to fix breakfast, and from the kitchen window I see the sun rise in everincreasing intensity. I reflect on these two faithful witnesses to the God who wants to be known.

The sun and moon are part of God's diverse and profuse communication with humanity. He sows planets and stars in space like so many crops on earth. The picture we get of God from nature is incomplete, but every terrain and clime, every detail or horizon, whether bleak or beautiful, reveals something of Him. Everywhere, God is trying to startle us awake that we might see Him.

God formed the heavens and the earth with man in mind: "For this is what the LORD sayshe who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabitedhe says: `I am the LORD, and there is no other. I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob's descendants, `Seek me in vain"' (Is. 45:1819).

God's primary intent is to reveal Himself, not to hide; to speak, not to withdraw. God did not put in man the need for Him and then retreat to a dark corner of an impossible maze. In His essential nature, God is a communicator.

Everywhere, a longing God attempts to unfold some glory of Himself in smaller glories that our finite minds can receive. Once I recognize these minirevelations, I find that no matter how wondrous the attribute or aspect of God disclosed, I am most moved by the act of revelation itself. That God, holy and majestic, puts aside His dignity and manifests Himself in the most ordinary kinds of things astonishes me.

God not only condescends to make Himself known, He expresses divine mysteries in terms concrete and familiar to make the truth accessible to our limited human minds. Like a father who stoops to look his toddler in the eye, God considers our limitations.

God typifies, interprets, and explains Himself in numerous similes, metaphors, and analogies. Does it strike you as funny and touch you deeply that God would tell us He is like a chicken, a gardener, a nursing mother, a rock? I suppose Athanasius, a fourthcentury believer, was right when he said, "Just because God cannot tell us what He is, He very often tells us what He is like."

Perhaps God feels the limitation of poet James Ramsey Ullman, who struggles to make an inadequate language express His thoughts: "There were no words for his images. He would have to invent new ones, stretch the dry withered skin of language until it could hold the flesh and blood of lifeand the white breath of vision."

The psalmist stretches words almost to the breaking point when he writes, "He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart" (Ps. 91:4).

It would be ludicrous, even blasphemous, to say that God is a bird or a shield. But God reveals His longing heart as He parcels out His magnificence in little packages that only imperfectly represent Him so that we might know Him.

God’s Stories

Whenever my husband and I travel in the southeastern part of the United States, I notice the porch furniture and think of God's longing. Two or more chairs stud every porch. Wicker, cane, twig, wood, and wrought iron all monuments to the social arts. Once I counted 12 rocking chairs on one large porch. No wonder the South has produced so many of our country's greatest writers. Where better than a porch for a storyteller to finely hone his craft?

Everybody knows that a good story engages the listener more totally than a great speech. So God tells tales of love and longing. His stories detonate with tremendous force. The prodigal sona story of waste, purposelessness, jealousy . . .and love (Lk.15:1132). Hosea and Gomer a tale of degradation and restoration (Hosea). One tells a story about a rebellious child and the

other about an unfaithful spouserelevant topics for any generation.

A restless, angry son throws away a good life at home and ends up eating with the pigs. A wife, with lust insatiable, strikes out on her own and finds herself on the auction block. Common stories both. The uncommon part is that the heartbroken father and the wronged husband play God's part.

To illustrate something of His desire for us, God commanded Hosea to marry a woman unworthy of him. Gomer was unloving, ungrateful, and unfaithful. Hosea loved and provided for her, but she was hell-bent on looking elsewhere for love. Despite her ingratitude and frantic and brazen promiscuity, God told Hosea, "Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods"(Hos.3:1).

This the account of a real woman on a fast and slippery selfdestructive slide, a woman ravaged and dissipated by loose living, a woman staggering in the muck and mire of poor choices. Gomer, a shell of the woman she could have been, is bought out of prostitution by her husband and taken home again as his wife.

Neither Gomer nor the prodigal son could see how good they had it at home. It was some craving within that drove them wantonly on. This is the human condition: unsatisfied, restless, driven by some sense that life is better on the other side of the fence.

The high point of these stories, for me, is that just when I expect God to lob hand grenades, He runs to His son, falls on his neck with kisses, and kills a fatted calf for a dinner celebration. When I expect Him to say, "Serves you right," or, "Fry in hell," He buys Gomer out of slavery and makes her a bride again.

God's longing leaves me disturbed and embarrassed for Him. I don't want Him to make a fool of Himself over Gomer or a delinquent boy. I don't want to see Him standing there with red, swollen eyes or an aching lump in His throat.

And then He turns those blood-rimmed eyes toward me. Drapes the robe around my shoulders. Slips the ring on my finger. And turns me toward home.

In these dramas, God thwarts efforts to find satisfaction in illegitimate ways. He says of Gomer, "Therefore I will block her path with thorn bushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them" (Hos. 2:67). All this that she might say, "I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now" (Hos. 2:7).

The same pattern occurs in the prodigal son's story. A severe famine hit. His money gone, he fed the pigs and went hungry himself. "When he came to his senses, he said, `How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father. . ."' (Lk. 15:1718).

God's longing, as well as our longing, resonates in these stories of agonizing loss. Good things and good circumstances cannot fill our yearning place. Incredible as it sounds, the good life stirs the fires of longing as powerfully as hard times, because we have not yet found what we are longing for. We race off after lovers, wealth, power, freedom, and emptiness. Perhaps we are thwarted, bruised, and stripped to bring us to our senses, to turn us around. In all this, God waits that He might throw a party for the sheer joy of having us home again.

It seems that God will try almost anything to get our attention.  He shows fragments of Himself in every imaginable way. Our God jumps out from behind the couch or waits on the porch to spin another tale of truth and yearning for His class of “going-nowhere” fourth graders, rebellious sons, and unfaithful wives. Is there no end to the things He’ll try to move us toward home?

Lord, Your longing takes me by surprise and moves me. You want me to know You, but you never loom or blare. You come quietly, gently, softly, delivering parcels of Yourself and drawing me into Your longing with stories. Forgive me. I have such trouble looking beyond my own longing to see Yours. Open my heart to Your longing, O God.