Nearer, Still Nearer.

Since high school, it has been a habit of mine to compile all of my prayers, drawings, notes, memories, and grocery lists into one journal and carry this college-ruled amalgamation of my thoughts everywhere. Every once in a while, I read through it and reflect on past entries. It’s a practice that has become a spiritual discipline for me, an exercise in remembrance and a restoration of gratitude for all of the fragmented and feebly-written late-night prayers that God has answered. A few months ago, I scribbled this poem onto one of the pages of my journal:

Hour Father

I thought I’d come find you

in the stillness of morning

but now this day, crinkling,

has sloshed forward in time

pulled under its foot and fed

through space like cheap silk

in a singer sewing machine

but here I am Lord, lead me not

reeling into promised lands, send

not milk, not honey, not money,

just minutes. are there limits to

your gifts? Am I in it already,

that stretch of unexpiring time

you hover over like the ocean’s

beginning? all is yours, days

are bread, time is turning over.

It’s a distortionof the Lord’s Prayer, an exploration of what it means for God to “give us thisday our daily bread.” These days, I’ve found myself asking God for much morethan daily bread. My heart wants something more like weekly or monthly bread. Ikeep praying for proof of insurance—proof that my future is bright, that bythis time next year, things will be all right. But at the end of all theseasks, I am always back where I started, caught in my web of self-spunfrustration.

I do it to myself, like the prodigal son who wanted to be given all his inheritance at once so that he wouldn’t need his father’s day-to-day provision. Why do I crave distance and self-reliance so much? These are the things God cannot and will not promise us, yet I keep asking for them. He loves his people too deeply to be distant. He will not leave us to our own devices.

Prayer isstill such a mystery to me. But in my efforts to understand it, this is what I havelearned: our conversations with God should lead us into greater dependence onHim, not greater independence. He is not training us to be self-sufficient. Themore we talk with Him and learn His character, the more we should crave Hispresence. Nearness to God should yield an acute desperation to draw even nearer.

God gives us just enough—daily bread (Matthew 6:11), lamplight for our feet (Psalm 119:105), and mercies for each morning (Lamentations 3:22-23)—so that we can continually encounter how sufficient He is. We are known by God. He has committed to memory each of our needs and wants. And He loves to give them to us. The fact that He gives us just enough does not prove Him incapable or unwilling. On the contrary, He’s giving us more than we even know how to ask for! He is both providing for us and teaching us how to return to Him. How pitiful that we would write this off as divine stinginess.

Let’s not let our hearts curl up and grow cold toward His daily bread. Smothered in the closeness of our Creator and clothed in dependence on Him is the posture in which all human hearts will rest for eternity. It would serve us well to begin learning (rather, to begin allowing God to teach us) how to rest in that right now, even today, and not wait until Kingdom come.

words by Delaney Young and photo by Kailin Richardson