My father used to describe how he finally married my mother by saying, “She made me chase her until she caught me.” Though I am not sure just how much of this saying was reality, I have never forgotten the image. I have wondered if that is the same technique God uses when trying to draw us closer to Himself? It would seem that with the characteristics attributed to God, He could just snap His fingers and make it all happen, not just for me, but for the whole world. But that isn’t the approach He uses. He is much more willing to provide us the time and space to make our own free choice.
This desire to have His children choose Him is a very human-like desire. I am quite sure every parent can relate to this—it is a much greater joy to have your children desire to do something that pleases you than for them to just do it because they have to. It is as much a puzzle why we as God’s children would choose others, before Him, as best friend, but we do.
Instead of taking the “snap-the-fingers” approach, God reveals Himself in ways that have had humankind seeking Him ever since the beginning of time. He has often revealed Himself in nature, there is rarely the occasion when a person standing on the top of a mountain with others doesn’t hear someone utter the words, “Who could see all this and not believe in God!” Well God has had us climbing mountains from the very start; Noah at Mount Ararat, Abraham and “the mount of the Lord,” Moses and Mount Horeb, even Jesus was taken to the mountain top in the wilderness. He has also chosen other, even more unique revelations of Himself, like the pillar of fire by night that led the Israelites through the desert, or the burning bush which confronted Moses, or the earthquake at Jesus’s death. How about the birth of a child? How could anyone look into such innocence and deny God’s involvement. What of the beauty of a family Thanksgiving dinner where people have had to make a special effort to be there. The truth is that God is all around us in millions of different ways. I have come to believe that this is God “making us chase him until he catches us” like how my mother tantalized my father so many years ago.
Why does God choose to communicate this way? I can only speculate, but my guess is that God “condescends” in ways that humans can understand. As an analogy: when I talk with my dog, Hemi, I do so in a way that he can understand, usually in single word sentences; “Go” “Come” “Sit” and the like. On occasion I might venture to use two words like “Bad dog” or “Good dog.” It is not all I can say, but rather, all he can understand. I don’t discuss the evening news or debate political candidates with him, not because I don’t have thoughts on the subjects, but because this kind of conversation is clearly over his head.
Could it be that God does something like that for us? God knows everything. We are the ones with the limitations. So it seems that the point of all this is to help us make good choices over and over again in much the same way that I repeat the training routine for Hemi, the more he is exposed to the same thing the more he accepts it as normal. I believe that God wants us to come to a place where we see Him in all things and so He continually reveals Himself in all things. On a good day I might see God here and there. On an exceptional day I might believe God is right there with me, but often I am puzzled as to His having left me to fend for myself. These thoughts have much more to do with me than with God.
It is at times like this that God is quick to give some revelation of Himself so that “He can make me chase Him until He has caught me.”
The journey is what it is about!
Father Bill Myrick
