GOD IN OUR LIVES
Be still before the Lord, and wait
patiently for him.(Ps. 37:7 RSV)
A little boy was afraid to go to his room alone. He was assured by his mother that God was there, even though it was dark. He went to the door, peeked in, and said, “God, if you’re in there, don’t move an inch or you’ll scare me to death.”
Unfortunately, that story is not too “far-out” in our experience. The God most of us know is one who, if he moves, will scare us to death. We know him as the author of the tragic death that came to a loved one through the tenacious claws of cancer. We see him in the earthquake that shakes a nation and swallows the innocent. We contribute to him all the evil that, if it were wrought by man, would send him to the gas chamber. If this God moves, he scares us to death.
The truth of the matter is we don’t know God!
Do you know the story of Dr. Tom Dooley? He was an American physician who worked in Southeast Asia at the outset of American involvement in the Vietnam War.. He was one of God’s great men in this age. He knew God in a manner that we long to experience. Here is a letter he wrote from Hong Kong, December 1, 1960:
“Dear Father Hesburgh:
“They’ve got me down. Flat on the back, with plaster, sandbags, and hot water bottles. I’ve contrived a way of pumping the bed up a bit so that, with a long reach,
I can get to my typewriter…
Two things prompt this note to you, Father. The first is that whenever my cancer acts up a bit, and it is certainly “acting up” now, I turn inward a bit. Less do I think of my hospitals around the world, or of ninety-four doctors, fundraisers, and the like. More do I think of one Divine Doctor and my personal fund of grace. Is it enough?
It has become pretty definite that the cancer has spread to the lumbar vertebra, accounting for all the back problems over the last two months. I have monstrous phantoms, all men do. But I try to exorcise them with all the fury of the Middle Ages. And inside and outside the wind blows.
But when the time comes, like now, then the storm around me does not matter. The winds within me do not matter. Nothing human or earthly can touch me. A milder storm of peace gathers in my heart. What seems unpossessable, I can possess. What seems unfathomable, I fathom. What is unutterable, I can utter.”
He concluded, “Because I can pray. I can communicate. How do people endure anything on earth if they cannot have God?”
Does Tom Dooley’s faith cause you to tingle? Does something hidden and suppressed within your life struggle for expression? Do you not sense a longing that you have known before, yet you never sought to really satisfy?
This is the God we need to know; not one that frightens us because we accredit to him that which a decent man would never think of doing, but one that sustains us in the midst of the wild storms of life that are always blowing.
How can we live and endure all the things we have to endure if we don’t have this God within ourselves? We can’t! We can live in the doldrums of dull listlessness, afraid talking about something that we have never experienced, chattering away with a lot of empty words to “shore us up,” but it will never be the personal experience that brings excitement and thrill, even amidst the storm, until we really know God, until he really lives within. He lives within only as we accept his will and commit our wills to his.
Why not now?