Patient God

I’ve forgotten His name because He is everywhere

Sometimes I get so busy I forget to check in with myself. Or, maybe “busy” isn't the right term (I’m always looking for ways to be anti-busy) but distracted. I get distracted and with the good and frivolous and stressful.

This post is an excerpt from a piece I wrote at Cultivating Oaks Press over a year ago, and I read it as a way to check in with myself. Am I still this person? Does this still ring true for who I am?

Yes, for better or worse.

Easter Morning, 1835 by Caspar David Friedrich

If we had forgotten the name of our God

and spread out our hands to a foreign god,

wouldn’t God have found this out,

since He knows the secrets of the heart?

Psalm 44:20-21 CSB

PATIENT GOD

I moved far away and He remembered my dwelling, remembered me back into place by His patience. I thought it was wisdom or good choices or inevitability but it was Him. He brought me home. 

I tried systems to systematize the life meant to be free but they failed. The systems failed. There are no real rails to lay down, only worn paths I leave and return to, systematically maybe. I want all the ways to work and when they don’t I think new systems will help and when they don’t I find old paths again, eventually. No rails, no pavement, but plenty of evidence that others have been here. I keep learning the same things, in deeper grooves. I find revelations in revelation twice revealed. The third time is even better but it’s maybe not “the charm”.

Patient God waits. I fool myself into believing I am the patient one—How long, O LORD?— that God doesn’t have to be patient because what is time and doubt and eternity to an all-knowing God. What is patience? He is waiting while I think it’s me—the one waiting. He is waiting for the circle to complete for me yet again, and He is patient because I require it.

I’ve forgotten His name because His presence is so common, and because His image in the face of my neighbor is marred by my own reflection: I want to see myself everywhere in everything all the time. How does your story mirror mine? Where am I in the narrative? And how does this apply to me?

Patient God. 

Read the rest of “The Patient, Mending God of Comfort and Secrets” here…