Up Close and Personal
When I was young, my parents took the
family camping at the foot of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington. One day we drove
the auto road to its summit. Though hot and muggy below, the air was refreshingly
cool up top. Decades later, Glenna and I returned, together with our own two
sons. We decided that instead of driving, we would hike up. Hikers see so much
more than do drivers—the mountain, the trees, the clouds, the birds, the
cascades in Peabody River. As kids cocooned in our car, we had missed so much.
I used to enjoy ocean kayaking off the New
Jersey coast. Struggling seaward requires paddling through breakers near the
shore. Once you pass them, however, the chatter and clutter of the crowds on
the beach fade to quiet, calm, and bubbly water noises. It’s you and the
ocean—up close and personal. In our digital days, surrounded by screens, we run
the risk of relinquishing reality.
The incarnation is God up close and
personal. God used to speak to Israel through the prophets. But you can learn
only so much through words. So “in these last days he has spoken to us in his
son.” In Jesus we find God—visible, tangible, up close and personal, where we
can see and understand. How close did he get? “What we have heard, what we have
seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands we
proclaim to you.”
Will we reciprocate, and be willing to get
close to God, or would we prefer to keep him safely at arm’s length? He wants
more: God walked the garden in the cool of the day calling, “Where are you?”
You are intimately acquainted with all my ways, says David. Yahweh used to
speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend. Jesus to his
Eleven—No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his
master is doing; but I have called you friends.
What about getting close to the Bible? It
is easy to drift along with a distant acquaintance, to re-translate Psalm
119:11 as “Thy word have I installed on my phone, that I might swipe through as
someone else reads.” How regularly do we sit with open Bible, no one else’s
guidebook, but only a notebook, pen, and the Spirit of God, in order to probe
and record what God is saying to me?