When God seems distant

Published 12:03 am Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Mom said, “If everyone is jumping into the fire, are you going to jump with them?”

I never knew where Mom got all these sayings. Life taught me its cousin, which is any sentence that begins with “They say.” Being the late bloomer in my family, I have tested these propositions on occasion. Time and experience proved their validity. I learned to beware of “they.”

“They say” is the siren song we seek for comfort. Some folks wish to be alone, but none want to be lonely. There is no doubt God made us for fellowship and relationship, but we humans have a proclivity for the extreme. Too often we look for a savior where there is none.

“They” is a neat place to look and hide while allowing our deficiencies to meld with others. In “they,” we seek a power we do not have in God’s presence. Searching, we are led to a mentality that undermines God’s purpose for a full and fruitful relationship with him. Did not God say, “You shall have no other gods before me”? I now know where Mom got her saying.

We are constant in our submission to the group, our other god. I can whip out my membership card in the Professional Golfers Association anytime, my god before God.

I am pretty sure there is no group entry into heaven. I cannot conjure an instant when there was more than one person standing before St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. I am confident heaven is not Disney World.

The group has a fondness for telling lies and dislikes dissension. The group seeks conformity. It has many faces. It infiltrates our thought and is intolerant toward the disloyal. It wishes to lord over us under a benevolent guise and we oblige it often unaware.

Life is a clarifying process, if we pay attention. Truth finds its way through failure and submission amid other gods and surfaces within the open heart seeking God.

God is good. The closer we are to him, the more we allow him in our life, the more we sup with the Almighty, the clearer becomes the way. Faith produces an aloneness quality, but we are never lonely when we commune daily with God.

My mother’s teaching guided me and saved me many times in my life. I jumped into some fires, but there were others I did not. Experience (God’s hand in it) and grace have equipped me with strength as I move forward. Fires are recognizable to me in old age. I remain watchful. I remain faithful.

Life’s reality stands in contrast with agape love’s unreality. When God seems distant, when we long for assurance, too easily do we accommodate the alternative, the group, history’s golden calf.

If there is a truth here, it is this: Our hope in tomorrow places our failure yesterday in a perspective that God intends for us to place in his service today.

“Those who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Matthew 11:15).

Deck Cheatham has been a golf professional for more than 40 years. He lives with his family in Dalton. Write to him at pgadeacon@gmail.com.