Missing You
My wife
left me! Don’t take that the wrong way;
she came back. But the experience has
got me thinking about absence. Not just
the absence of a wife.
As the deer
pants for streams of water,
so
my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul
thirsts for God, for the living God.
Where
can I go and meet with God?
Psalm
42:1-2
Sarah went
to Italy to serve with Thrive Ministries.
I knew she would be gone sixteen days, and she came back when I expected
(pretty close, anyway; she missed an airport connection, which necessitated an
alternate flight). Before we married,
she spent two weeks in Japan and the Philippines. Later this year she’ll go to Estonia. I have to get used to a globe-trotting wife.
I say to God my Rock,
Why
have you forsaken me?
Why must I
go about mourning,
oppressed
by the enemy?
Psalm
42:9
What do we
mean when we say, “I miss you”? It
varies from case to case, I suppose. I
can miss a wife, a student, or a friend.
We can miss places—an old home, a childhood neighborhood, or
landscapes. And there are more permanent
losses: loved ones who died, a friendship broken, jobs lost, and opportunities
wasted. In each case there is pain, a
hole in the heart.
When the
loss is temporary, the pain of separation adds joy to the reunion. It’s fun to kiss in airports! With permanent losses—Sarah and I lost our
first spouses to cancer—we may say time heals wounds, but it really doesn’t. The loss stays with us; it becomes part of us. A person’s interior life, the life of the
heart, is complicated. Sarah doesn’t
have to quit missing Loren in order to commit to me.
My bones
suffer mortal agony
as
my foes taunt me,
Saying to
me all day long,
“Where
is your God?”
Psalm
42:10
The
spiritual life is complicated too. At
times we experience God’s presence like an electric current, at other times
like a comforting embrace. Exciting or
reassuring, we rejoice when we fell God’s presence. But there are other times, times when God
seems distant or absent.
Vindicate
me, O God,
and
plead my cause against an ungodly nation;
Rescue me
from deceitful and wicked men.
Psalm 43:1
The
pleasure the believer used to feel in prayer or study or worship has gone
away. She feels alone in a world of
temptations, injustices, and mockery.
Even times of service, when she gives a cup of water in Christ’s name, seem
hollow and useless. Everything is
pointless—at least it feels that way.
It’s important for Christians to
understand that “dry” times are a normal part of the spiritual life. I don’t say that everyone will experience the
absence of God to the same degree, but it is common enough that no believer
should be surprised by it.
Who would claim to know the mind of
God completely? Not I. But it might help to consider some advantages
of the felt absence of God. First,
absence teaches us to proceed in obedience rather than pleasure. The beginner often needs special
encouragement to start learning a language or practicing a skill, but later a
good master will drop the constant reinforcement. The protégé needs the discipline of “going
on.”
Second, and perhaps more important,
the felt absence of God teaches us to trust.
We believe in God, and we believe he is working on us even when we don’t
feel it. Modern psychology can help us here,
because we have all become familiar with the notion of the unconscious. I don’t mean to endorse Freudianism or any
other school of psychology in detail.
But we are used to the idea—and it seems almost certainly true—that our
minds are complicated. Our conscious
thoughts and reasoning constitute the top layer; underneath are desires,
drives, fears, and “forgotten” things.
The good news of Christ’s gospel is “taken in” by the conscious mind,
but it also touches our inner selves.
In the dry times, then, we may
remind ourselves that God’s Spirit has the power to work on us—to speak to us—at
the unconscious level. He has that power; we trust him to use it.
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why
so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for
I will yet praise him,
my
savior and my God.
Psalm
42:5 (repeated in 42:11 and 43:5)
