Reaching for the Invisible God

T H I R S T -A L O N G I N G F O R G O DThe excerpt below is from Reaching for the Invisible God.How do you sustain a relationship with God, a being so different from any other, imperceptible by the five senses? I hear from an inordinate number of people struggling with questions like this-their letters prompted, I suppose, by books I''ve written with titles like Where Is God When It Hurts? and Disappointment with God.I have lived most of my life in the evangelical Protestant tradition, which emphasizes personal relationship, and I finally decided to write this book because I want to identify for myself how a relationship with God truly works, not how it is supposed to work.In carving my path I am following a map laid out by many others, the "great cloud of witnesses" who have preceded me. My struggles with faith have at least this in their favor: they come from a long, distinguished line. I find kindred expressions of doubt and confusion in the Bible itself. Sigmund Freud accused the church of teaching only questions that it can answer. Some churches may do that, but God surely does not. In books like Job, Ecclesiastes, and Habakkuk, the Bible poses blunt questions that have no answers.As I began this book, I went to friends whom I respect as Christians. I asked this question: "If a seeking person came to you and asked how your life as a Christian differs from hers as a moral non-Christian, what would you tell her?"Perhaps the most poignant response came from a friend whose name is well known in Christian circles. He thought for some time before responding, and then said this:I have no trouble believing God is good. My question is more, What good is he? I heard awhile back that Billy Graham''s daughter was undergoing marriage problems, so the Grahams and the in-laws all flew to Europe to meet with them and pray for the couple. They ended up getting divorced anyway. If Billy Graham''s prayers don''t get answered, what''s the use of my praying? I look at my life-the health problems, my own daughter''s struggles, my marriage. I cry out to God for help, and it''s hard to know just how he answers. Really, what can we count on God for?That final question struck me like a bullet and has stayed lodged inside me. I know theologians who would snort at such a phrase as one more mark of self-centered faith. Yet I believe it lies at the heart of much disillusionment with God. In all our personal relationships-with parents, children, store clerks, gas station attendants, pastors, neighbors- we have some idea what to expect. What about God? What can we count on from a personal relationship with him?Christians claim there are times, though perhaps less frequent than we would lead others to believe, when we do make personal contact with the Creator of the universe. "I have seen things that make all my writings seem like straw," wrote Thomas Aquinas about one such encounter. I too have felt the tug at times, a tug strong enough to jerk me out of cynicism and rebellion, strong enough to wrench my life in a new direction. Yet for long stretches, achingly long stretches, I have also sat with my headphones on (as did Jodie Foster in the movie Contact), desperate for some message from the other world, yearning for reassuring contact, and heard only static.How can something as fundamental as a God who created us to know and love him become so tenuous? If God, as Paul told a sophisticated crowd of skeptics in Athens, "did this," meaning all creation, in order that we might reach out and find him, why not make himself more obvious? Writers of the Bible lived in the "Holy Land," where bushes burst into flame, where rocks and volcanoes gushed sacred metaphors and the stars bespoke God''s grandeur. No longer. The supernatural world has seemingly gone into hiding, leaving us alone with the visible. The thirst for God, though, for contact with the unseen, the hunger for love from a cosmic Parent who can somehow fashion meaning from this scrambled world, defiantlyYancey, Philip is the author of 'Reaching for the Invisible God' with ISBN 9780310240570 and ISBN 0310240573.