Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. . . . —Matthew 28:20 (KJV)
When I was a kid, I thought God was a huge noun, an epic He, a vast Him, an unthinkably immense and mysterious Whom. I understood the idea well enough to realize that God probably did not look like old Walt Whitman, cool as the poet was. But I did think God was an entity, a being of some unimaginable sort—the Dreamer, the Imagineer, the Speaker of the Word.
Later, I began to think of God as a verb, a relentless unquenchable energy, a force, a drive, a whisper that can be heard anywhere and anytime, if you made yourself available and attentive. So for years I tried most assiduously to see and hear and savor the divine music in which we swim. Now, I begin to realize that God comes to me most and clearest and loudest through all things that are alive. Daughters and deer and dormice, sons and swallows and sunfish.
Consider the bright red shout of a salmon headed home, the blue chord of a jay, the divine I am here, I am with you that is my wife’s hand stealing out to find mine as we wait at the hospital for news of our child. Do not look up for God, I told my sweet, eager, headlong Sunday school students—look around at the flutter in the ferns, at your mother; consider the birds of the air, those shards of joy flung into the vault of heaven, they who are of God, who are suffused with God, for God is not a place or a person. God is love and joy and hope and grace; God is Who we sing when we are our best and truest and deepest selves.
Dear Merciful Inventor, let me be a decent, if slightly battered and cracked, vessel for delivering Your grace and love. Let me see and hear You always, even when I am deaf and selfish and blinkered. Let me do the best I can to share the song of You in my own mumbled mutter.
Editor’s Note: Sadly, beloved Daily Guideposts contributor Brian Doyle passed away on May 27, 2017. We are forever grateful for the many gifts he shared with us.
