Why does it seem God hides so much? Where is he? Even the ancients admitted: “Truly you are a God who hides himself;” and “Why do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” ((Isa. 43:15; Ps. 10:1).
God is funny in that he doesn’t yell at us saying, “Hey, look over here. Here I am!” God is not into pyrotechnics and special effects. He is into asking questions of us. He sometimes seems to hide, only to reveal himself at just the right time, in just the right way, in a way his voice is unmistakable, penetrating our hearts. He’s more like the friend who’s been there all along and we only realize it when all the others have gone. He’s more like the air we take for granted until we’re choking to death. He’s more like the water that quenches our thirst after the Diet Coke has left us dry.
ARE YOU THIRSTY?
There is, however, one sure way to notice God calling you, to hear his still small voice. Are you ready? Be quiet and listen to this question: Are you thirsty?
If you feel a thirst that this life is not quenching, then God is pursuing you. Frederick Buechner writes, “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.”[1]
WHERE CAN I QUENCH MY THIRST?
As we search for what will quench our thirst, God waits for us to turn to him. Once, he waited for a woman who was very thirsty. She had been divorced five times. She had given up on marriage and was living with a partner. She had not found what she was looking for in life. She was thirsty, thirsty for love, thirsty for security, thirsty for joy, thirsty for purpose, thirsty for someone to say, “I really do love you.” We find her story in John 4, where we see Jesus deciding to go to her, in Samaria. Although the Jews and the Samaritans hated each other for centuries, and although in that culture men did not talk with women alone in public, Jesus breaks the barriers of hate, culture, and gender. It doesn’t matter when you need to meet God, he will humble himself to meet you.
Jesus begins talking with her about living water that will quench her thirst, but she doesn’t get it. So Jesus drops a bomb and tells her to go call her husband and come back. Jesus doesn’t mince words. He was trying to show her that those failures in her life were just the stagnant wells from which she was trying to get satisfaction instead of from God.
She quickly changes the subject to worship, asking where is the right place to worship God. Why did she suddenly bring up worship? Because in those days, worship primarily meant, “Where do I bring a sacrifice?” People offered animal sacrifices as the means to approach God, as a way of saying, “God, I am guilty, and I need forgiveness. I need reconciliation with you.” What the woman wanted to know is: “Where do I meet God? Where can I bring my guilt, my loneliness, my thirst?”
Jesus answers by saying, “Woman, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. A time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
The woman responded, “I know that the one they call the Messiah is supposed to come and reveal everything to us.”
Jesus now pushes the door wide open: “I, the one who is speaking to you, am the Messiah.”
Shocked, the woman left her bucket and went back to the town and said to the people, “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”
WHO IS SEEKING WHOM?
God had been seeking this woman all her life, but she had shut God out by placing him in the category of “religion.” But God wouldn’t let her do that. God won’t be confined to Jerusalem, or the Vatican, or Mecca, or Sri Lanka, or anywhere else. He seeks people, and especially those like this woman who are thirsty. And he tenderly places the cup of love, joy, and acceptance to her lips and ours and says, “Drink to the full.”
Jesus makes it clear that God is intensely personal, and God is the one doing the seeking. I used to think, “I’ve got to find God, I’ve got to find God.” But I have realized God was the one that was seeking me. Your whole concept of God changes when you realize that you’re the one doing the hiding and God is the one doing the seeking.
Anne Lamott is a bestselling author and a Christian, but she wasn’t always a Christian. Before she became a Christian, she was an alcoholic, a drug addict, and bulimic. She was having an affair with two different married men at the same time. She realized her life was a mess, so she started attending a small church, but she would sit on the back pew and leave right after the sermon. But she had this sense that God was following her. She got pregnant by one of those married men she was having an affair with, and so she had an abortion. She described it as the lowest point of her life. That night she got drunk and took a sleeping pill to go to sleep. The next night, she got drunk and took a sleeping pill to go to sleep. She did that for seven nights, and on the seventh night, she was ready to commit suicide.
In her book, Traveling Mercies, she writes that on that night, she became aware of someone hunkered down in the corner of her room. She writes, “The feeling was so strong, I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there–of course there wasn’t. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt Him as surely as I feel my dog lying beside me as I write this. I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner, watching me with patience and love, and I squinted my eyes shut, but that didn’t help because that’s not what I was seeing him with.”[2] She thought her emotions and the chemicals in her body were playing tricks on her, “born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood. But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to open the door and let it in.”[3] She went back to the little church, and she says the last song they sang was “so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape….I felt something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling—and it washed over me.” She went back to her home, and “I took a long deep breath and said out loud, ‘All right. You can come in.’”[4]
A BUCKET PROBLEM
C.S. Lewis said there are three types of people in this world. There’s the foolish person who says, “If I can only find the right person, the right career, the right….” Then there’s the disillusioned person, the one who has tried all those things and says, “Nothing is going to satisfy me, so I’m just going to live it out the way I want to.” Then there’s the realist who says, “If I’m thirsty for something that this world can’t satisfy, then I must be made for something greater.”[5] Solomon, the wisest man in the world, concluded that all of life on this earth is meaningless without God. And right in the middle of Ecclesiastes, his book about how meaningless life is, he writes, “God has made everything beautiful in its time, but he also set eternity in the human heart” (Ecc. 3:9).
As Peter Kreeft writes, “Our souls are God-shaped vacuums, and this infinite abyss can only be filled with an infinite and eternal object, i.e., by God. This desire is God’s footprint in the sands of our soul. This discontent with known earthly joy, this longing for an unknown joy more than earth can ever offer, is the most moving thing in our lives because it is really our longing and love for God, whether we know it or not.”[6]
We were made for God’s greatness and glory, and he seeks us because he loves us, and he calls us to come back to the source of all joy and good things—God himself—and he will fill us.
We humans have a bucket problem. We think, “If I just fill this bucket with this stuff, I’ll be happy.” We keep filling buckets, and they don’t satisfy. As the prophet Jeremiah said, we’ve turned our souls into broken buckets that can’t hold water (Jer.2:13). But God says, “You are the bucket, and I want to fill your soul with me.”
C. S. Lewis writes, “If you want to get wet, you must get into the water. And if you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to or even into the thing that has them. These are not just some sort of prizes which God hands out. They are the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality. Once a person is united to God, they come as gifts, and that person could not help but live forever.”[7]
But for God to fill us, we must lose our buckets. Jesus said God is seeking those who will worship him in spirit, which means finally surrendering our spirits–our hearts and minds–to him. And God is seeking those who worship him in truth, which means we have to give up and acknowledge that only God can fill us. The truth is that nothing on this earth will satisfy us without God.
The truth is, we’re all failures. There’s not a one of us who can’t look back and see stagnant wells in our life. But the truth is, the one who was speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well (and to us) is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The truth is, he is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. The truth is, there is a thief who tries to allure us, but he comes only to steal and to kill and destroy. But the truth is, Jesus has come to give us life and life to the full! The truth is, Jesus reveals the way to the heart of God. The truth is that the truth is not some concept, dogma, or doctrine—the truth is personal; the truth is a Person! Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”
You can read more about this passionate, seeking, fulfilling God in my book Meet God (Before You Die), available on Amazon and at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/meet-god-before-you-die.
[1] Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark (New York: HarperCollins, 2006),19.
[2] Lamott, Traveling Mercies (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 49, 50.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Collier Books, 1943), 120.
[6] Peter Kreeft, The God Who Loves You (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), 31.
[7] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 153.