As she left our home, headed for her car, I called out, “Thanks for not staying a stranger.” She is cousin to my own children’s cousins, and had connected also with our youngest son with both of them working in Manhattan. Sometimes though her work takes her to Charleston, and knowing we had recently moved to the area, decided to make a contact. We were delighted that she did. Once a stranger, she quickly became family, as we shared a meal together in our home, nothing fancy, and then sat around the table, reminisced, checked out some baby books and photo albums, laughed, just enjoyed getting to know each other, and the stranger left, promising to return, but she was now, family.
It’s a similar familiarity and closeness that our God longs to share with us, and yet even closer and more intimate. Our daughter grew within me, but very shortly after her birth on Earth, Jesus carried her to her eternal home in Heaven. She has already shared decades with Him in the beauty of perfection and the delight of a communion with the Godhead in intimate, precious ways that literally, I can only imagine. Once, as I put my own heart on paper and wrote a letter to Tonia, I said, “As I imagine the reunions that must occur in Heaven and the excitement of welcoming others who come, my heart becomes eager to know the same reality that you know. But as I stay in the place God has for me now, that tender place in my heart is tender too towards the hurts and disappointments of others. My heart has been enlarged and my capacity to give has been stretched by grace. I am far from perfect, but some day I will share in the perfection you already have shared in. And as I wait, I pray that the heavenly Father you have known so intimately all these years, will be more and more at home in my heart, that I would be no stranger to His presence when I am blessed to share it with you, my daughter.”
I long for a reality with God that pulsates with the warmth of knowing how close He is to me, even here on this earth. I long for Him to be my breath, my purpose, my motivation, my grace, and my enabler. I long for Him to be as real as Tori was when she came to our home. I long to some day know the reality Tonia already knows. I don’t want to have just mushy feelings, but I want the facts of His reality, His up-closeness, His literal presence to seem “touchable.” I want to respond to and nurture that depth of intimacy so that it will draw me still closer. I don’t want to be a stranger to His presence when I am blessed to share it with my daughter.
I sat with my mother-in-love when the doctor told her about the cancer that was destroying her body. Polly, I called her “Mom,” was no stranger to the God she loved, the God she shared with others, the God she longed to see when death would graduate her from Earth to Heaven. When the doctor finished speaking, I was consumed by her response. With a quietness and an anticipation, she spoke the words, “Now, I know how I will go to see my dear Lord Jesus.” Even as I write the words, the tears come, because this was a woman who was deeply in love, and her God was no stranger. Oh, Father, help me to know you with a passionate, intimate knowing. Just like Tonia. Just like Mom.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Psalm 63:1-8)
