1 April 2025
When a child is neglected, but then finds themselves in the presence of a loving care-giver, that child leans into the new connection with such a force that they seem incapable of being separated from that loving presence. I knew such a girl. She had grown up in an overcrowded orphanage, and her place was on a thin mat underneath a crib. Often, she was forgotten, and rarely was she interacted with by adults. She died young. However, a loving couple had adopted her, and for a time in her life, she knew connection. She had an interesting behavior. With an atrophied arm and hand, she would reach out toward a light source as if it was inviting her into its presence.
The letter of Paul to the Romans paints a similar picture of our lives. Sin, that darkness and abandonment that we have grown up into, and which atrophies our hearts’ capacity to love, is ever present with us. Even after we have received the Lord’s saving grace, we find ourselves doing things that are of that darkness rather than the light. In our new hearts we delight in the law of God, yet this sense of turning away from him and toward our own efforts to appease our inner hungers permeates our lives so much that we seen never to be free of it. It is no wonder to me that Paul would cry out, “What a wretched man I am!”
The amazing thing, though, is that NOTHING can separate us from the love of God. The presence of the Lord in our lives changes everything. How patiently the Lord reminds us of what we truly seek, too. While we scramble after him thinking what we want is to be fed once again as a matter of his generous provision, he tells us to look beyond that to the real desire in our hearts. What we want most deeply is to be connected to the One who made us. Despite the sinful tendency of turning away from the Lord in multitudinous fashion, sin still fails to keep us from God. The law, which taught us about sin, is powerless to save us, so why do we fall back into trying to somehow earn the love of God? The love of the Lord just IS. Nothing can separate us from it. Look how much care Yahweh gave to Adam and Eve after their destructive turning away, or the protection provided to Cain after killing his brother. If we have a heart like David, we realize that our foibles become means to turn our hearts back into connectedness with our loving Lord.
The cry of Jeremiah at the gates of Jerusalem, “Do not carry a load on the Sabbath,” is a call to connectedness. He didn’t cry, ‘stay away from idols’ or ‘keep the 10 commandments.’ It was a reminder to wholly rely on the Lord, that which can only be done by abiding in his presence.