Something strange has been happening in my inbox. My email account is filled with letters that are meant to be inclusive and inviting but in fact only remind me that I am a bit of an outcast. For all practical purposes, I am a part of the group, but I’m not REALLY a part of the group.
I am enrolled in a distance-learning program at a seminary I once attended, taking some additional classes via the Internet. This has put my email address back on the official list of students, and the result is that I have been let in again — into the world of campus events and conversations, into the assembly where announcements are made, and daily life on academic grounds is abuzz with similar concerns and comments. But my life is not similar. My commute is not affected by the repaving of 13th Street or the snow ploughs in the parking lots, and I would have to leave right now in order to make an all-campus event by evening. The school is several states away, and I am reminded of it every time I open an email. Though I am a part of it, I live outside of the intimate world I read about.
There are times when reading the Scriptures that I feel a similar twinge of distance and social dislocation. It is sometimes a struggle to wholly relate to the hardships of the apostle Paul or the enemy-conscious world of David. In some ways my life is similar, but it is also vastly dissimilar. I am surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, teamed with fellow runners in the race set before us, but am I fully a part of the group? Do I live like David from battle to battle as one after the very heart of God? Can I stand with my life of doubt and questions beside the list of the faithful outlined in the book of Hebrews? Can I live in the type of community the early church once lived? There is a distance between the lives lived in Scripture and the life I find before me.
When I am honest, I must admit that God’s promises, too, seem to linger in my imagination with a difficult distance about them. Like the student/faculty lunches I can only picture in my mind, I long for the reality I read about. What will it look like to have every tear wiped from our eyes? How long will it be before the current order of things becomes the “old order of things” and “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain”? I read with a keen awareness of the distance between what I see and what I will see. The golden streets described in Revelation are even more unreachable than the freshly paved and painted parking lots I hear about in student email.
But unlike the letters that invite me to vicariously experience the life of a student on campus, Jesus’s words do not approach me as words that can be embraced indirectly. I walk away from the Sermon on the Mount feeling as leveled by the words as the crowd must have been that day. Sensing the fullness of the moment as Jesus spoke with the woman at the well, I leave the story feeling something other than full. Like her, I am left with the fearful image of sitting before the one who can tell me “everything I ever did” and the incredible thirst to know in spirit and in truth the one who knows me better than myself.
In C.S. Lewis’s novel TIL WE HAVE FACES, a character on the verge of meeting the “god of the Mountain” reasons bluntly with another, “Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”(1) Elsewhere Lewis reasons similarly, “At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”(2)
In the distance between what we see now and what we shall one day see is the longing that reminds us of home. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
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1. C.S. Lewis, TIL WE HAVE FACES (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1966), 76.
2. C.S. Lewis, THE WEIGHT OF GLORY (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 17.
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Copyright © 2006 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. “A Slice of Infinity” is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.