You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. Psalm 63:1
It hurts seeing it happening and not knowing how to change it. I hate remembering the feeling of my phone buzzing in the middle of a conversation and losing my thought train at the possibility of it being her.
Now, glimpsing the iMessage notification announcing her desire to know how my day is going, a sigh escapes. It’s clear that my inability to really tell her reflects the slowly dimming flame.
I had failed at this before but somehow thought it would be different. After all, I’ve changed, matured, found real love even.
Slouching on my bed my fingers lie and text, “It’s going great,” making up an excuse for being “so busy.”
Though my gross lie is believable it’s obvious the deceit doesn’t fool her. Not seeing her face in front of me and hearing her voice only through a complicated box in my hand has paid its toll.
Long distance has watered down my feelings and locked me in a prison of apathy.
As I moved across the world to be a missionary in Germany, my relationship with Jesus could only go up, right? Giving up a relationship, my dream job in Chicago, and friends and family for Jesus could only mean achieving a perfect relationship with Him.
Yet weeks in my shameful eyes glared at my bible on the couch next to me like it was a text message I didn’t want to respond to. How do you go from being so in love with Jesus that you get goosebumps at the thought of spending time with Him to feeling anxious and stressed knowing you should?
The more I seemed to do “for” God, the farther we got. My spirit noticed the emptiness and worldly anxiety of my past filling my body, and fear filled my soul. Like a scared and panicked child running back to what he knows, my mind latched onto familiarity: Guilty Christianity, a false gospel that preaches earning love and punishing failure. Failure was my identity and the growing distance between me and my Creator was because living up to perfection was like climbing a rock face with no limbs.
But that wasn’t it. By doing more for God, my day was just filled with more. More service and more sacrifice. Us getting farther was just me being ok with less. Less intimacy and less relationship. I traded hours of laughter, tears, and conversation with my heavenly Father for a daily bible verse and prayer that asked, “Help me today, Lord.” Coffee dates with my God and watching the sunset with Him switched to one text a day that wrote, “Thinking of you.” The hard work of telling Him my feelings stopped and my life, though dedicated to Him, became too busy.
Allowing Him to slip from my suitcase at the airport, I traveled to Germany and never turned to find Him. Coming home for Christmas break with nothing to do, His presence was found. And it clicked. I had unknowingly left Him behind and tried to make it work over the phone.
But… You can’t. To walk with Jesus is to do life with Him. The Lord wants our hearts; to connect and speak with us. The desire to serve and be busy is great, but if it stops us from simply abiding in Him then… we’ve missed the whole point.
We must make time to, sit alone, and pour out our hearts to our Father in Heaven. Tell Him how you feel: your struggle, sorrow, joy, and whatever is happening in your life. As you open the Word, ask Him to commune with you and to speak. Listen for Him, talk with Him, be with Him. A prayerless life is a relationally dead one. To do relationship with Jesus, you must treat it as such. Do not like me, crowd your life with so much stuff that you haven’t time with Christ. Don’t have a long-distance relationship with God.
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13
One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple. Psalm 27:4
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