Distraught and Longing for God

I didn't attend seminary until I was 35 years old, and so I have a pretty good sense of how easy it is to feel disconnected for faith and from God in much of day to day life. Our culture encourages us to divide things up between the spiritual world and the real world, or as a theologian might say, between the sacred and the profane.

It's actually quite easy to maintain such a division while working in the church. A great deal of what pastors and other church professionals do can be understood as work without much of a spiritual connection. Even preparing a sermon can become simply an exercise that is part academic study and part creative writing. And should a pastor become so spiritually dry that even this becomes impossible, there are tons of sermons floating around on the internet, there for the taking. (I've always wondered how much of that happens with the sermons I post here. My blog site's statistics often show a small run on my three year old sermons just prior to their texts showing up again as a Sunday reading.)

One of those things they teach you in seminary is how Jesus sanctifies the mundane. In Jesus, God gets seen in the day to day, eating and drinking, walking along the road, talking to the people he meets, going to a dinner party. But we keep trying to put God back in select, special places and moments. Not that sanctuaries and retreats and special times of prayer aren't important. But when God is only at church or in set aside devotional times, very little of our lives are lived with God, or with much awareness of God.

Today's psalmist seems to have lost any sense of God's presence. The writer is nearly distraught, speaking of a cast down and disquieted soul..

   As a deer longs for flowing streams,
          so my soul longs for you, O God.
    My soul thirsts for God,
          for the living God.
    When shall I come and behold
          the face of God?
    My tears have been my food
          day and night,
    while people say to me continually,
          “Where is your God?”

Is it possible that our neat separating of spiritual life from the rest of life helps insulate us from what the psalmist feels? If God is only at church or in those times we may set aside for prayer and devotion, then there is no reason to expect God in the day to day, and no reason to be upset when God cannot be found there. Perhaps we protect ourselves from the pain the psalmist feels if we confine God to a few spiritual or sacred venues. But in the process we quite likely insure a relationship with God lacking in any real depth and substance.

Anyone who has ever been in love with another person and had that relationship go awry likely has felt something akin to what the psalmist feels. I've known a few people who "protected" themselves from such suffering by never getting too close to anyone. But even though they may indeed avoid some of the suffering that afflicts others, I think that most people pity them.

Have you ever been distraught like the psalmist over your relationship with God? As strange as it may sound, I really hope so.

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