Returning

I think I've been living life in the wrong metaphor.

What I mean by that is, I think that my fundamental picture of how life works has been slightly off.  It's always popular, even to the point of being slightly cliché, to think of life as a journey.  Countless books, poems, songs, etc. have been written from this perspective, even though the ones written apart from God often fail to offer much hope as to the journey's destination.  As Christians, though, we especially love this metaphor because the Bible promises the ultimate destination, heaven.

Now, I'm not trying to say there's anything wrong with the idea of a journey.  It's hard to argue with the popular success and powerful impact of a book like Pilgrim's Progress, for example, and the story of Christian's journey to the Celestial City has actually been a big inspiration to me over the years.  It's just that the allegory in that story, like all metaphors, is limited in scope.  Obviously, no metaphor can ever fully become the exact thing it represents, or else it would be superfluous (which by the way, is one of my favorite words and one I've been dying to work into one of my blogs somehow).  That's why it's important to recognize where comparisons fall short and see just how far they can stretch before they break.

Here's how the Pilgrim's Progress-style journey metaphor got my thinking a little off: basically, I started thinking about life as a voyage towards God, who waits for us at a fixed destination as we slowly and circuitously (another one of my favorites) make our way closer and closer to him.  Catch the subtle twist introduced in that viewpoint?  It makes God the destination instead of heaven.  It's an easy jump to make, especially in light of the fact that heaven is where our fellowship with the Lord will be complete and full.  The thing is, he's not just sitting around up there waiting for us.  If God was a destination, he would of course be the best one to aim for.  But he's not.  He's everywhere.  In fact, our only hope of making it to our destination of glory in heaven is that God is in us (Colossians 1:27).

Now, the hope of heaven is a huge deal, and it has helped me through a lot of struggles in this life to know that one day all those struggles will be permanently erased by joy.  If we make the mistake of confining God to heaven, though, we can miss out on the fact that he travels with us.

We are not alone on our journey.

This is immensely important, not least of all because the idea of trying to get closer to a God we can't reach until heaven is a bit of a depressing prospect.  It's also important because it gives us a much more accurate picture of what life is actually like.

I'm coming to think of life more and more as a constant returning.  Instead of thinking of a one-way voyage toward heaven, I'm thinking more of a continuous coming back to God, wherever he is.  That way, my actions are relieved of the pressure of moving me closer to or further from heaven.  Really, if I've truly accepted Jesus, my salvation is secure and I'm moving toward heaven at the same rate as all other Christians: 60 seconds per minute.  I have no control over that; when I reach the end of the time God has written in my book, I'll just be there!  However, I don't have to wait to be with God until then.  Eternal life begins now, because eternal life simply means to know God (John 17:3), and he is actually walking with me.

God is not distant.  He is near me, and at times I walk right by his side.  Other times, I get distracted and let things pull me away.  Because this is a fallen world, there are a lot of opportunities for distraction.  The question, though, is not so much of moving forward or backward, of climbing up or falling back down, of progress or regress, but of whether the things of life will draw me towards God or away from him as he walks with me.

Will I return to God if a situation draws me away from him?  Will I re-turn my face toward his if something distracts my attention elsewhere?  The command to return to the Lord is echoed over and over again throughout the Old Testament by all kinds of prophets in all different situations, from captivity to prosperity.  In fact, every single thing that happens in life (like jobs, relationships, emotions, our own sins, or God's gifts to us, just to name a few) offers the choice to turn toward God or away from him, but he is always with us.  He is in control of the destination and how we get there.  The part he gives us a say in is how much like him we'll become along the way.

We become like whatever we look at.  To become like God, we need to turn towards him.  And because this life is so distracting and so many things draw our attention away, we need to re-turn towards him.  Often.  Always.  We have to fix our gaze on him, and then when we look away, look back.  Constant returning.  God's grace to us is that no matter how many times we need to return, he will still be there.

I was worshipping God at c-hop recently, and we ended up singing that Jesus is our soul's refrain, the part of the song we keep coming back to.  That's a whole different metaphor that I don't have time to address right now, but I think the journey works fine if we understand it correctly in the sense of always returning to a God who walks with us.  To finish, though, here's part of another song (Psalm 73: 23-26) that pretty much sums up what I mean by all of this:

"Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand.  You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory.  Whom have I in heaven but you?  And earth has nothing I desire besides you.  My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."