Eternal power and weariness
When I was a teenager, I remember picking rocks on my uncle’s farm. It was a hot day, and by afternoon I was weary. We had a break. I looked out at a slough, which to little me looked big enough to be a lake, and I saw nature in all its power. The water, the hills, the trees, the wind and the sheer size of nature compared to exhausted me left an impression I can still recall today.
Later I taught senior English poetry and the Romantics. Wordsworth had a grasp of the eternal in nature. In nature there is “A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things.” To Wordsworth the sea breaking on the coastline made “A sound like thunder—everlastingly.” By contemplating nature, “We see into the life of things.”
The power of God is in nature, in the rocks, in the eternal water cycle. That day on my uncle’s farm I had a sense of God, but I did not have a mature understanding of God and reality. I had an understanding of weariness. Today I am better equipped to handle physical and soul weariness. Will Thompson’s hymn comes to mind:
Come home, come home,
You who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home!
The hymn goes on to remind us that time is fleeting. Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming for you and for me. But the wonderful love Jesus has promised us, the Father’s love, will pardon us with his mercies. The biggest failure in our relationship with God our Father is that we do not understand how much he loves us. The beauty and expanse of nature, its constancy, gives us a hint. The heavens at night give us a hint of eternity.
Jesus tried so many different ways to show the Father’s love for us. The shepherd calls his sheep. The prodigal son is welcomed with open arms. Perhaps we are like a son or daughter who has been in the father’s house all these years but just never realized the intimacy of love. God is a lover, a creator, a king, a sustainer.
As children we were close to the heart of God. We had a special relationship with him that allowed us to touch his heart like only a child can. That special place in God’s heart is still open. We are closer to the heart of our God than we can ever realize in this world. “I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jeremiah 31:3).
Our relationship with God is not often that of an ardent lover. It is true. We find too little joy in this love relationship that should have us dancing. Through his prophets Yahweh has always referred to us in the metaphor of a marriage relationship. In Hosea 2 we see the theme of love of a husband (God) which is more enduring than the infidelity of the wife (Israel).
The divine spark inside us makes us restless to seek what will satisfy us. God’s energy in us drives us to greatness, to art, to love, to worship. It drives us away from sin and discontent. We can only find fulfillment and balance when we surrender to all that is good and holy. We are indeed restless until we rest in God.
(581 words)
