A man tries to talk to his wife about how he’s feeling. All the while, she’s thinking about the jobs that need doing. She’s present in one sense, but in another she’s gone elsewhere.
Our physical presence is, of course, just one manifestation of who we are and what we bring to the world around us. But often it can simply be a front, a persona, a pose: a way of presenting who we are to the world without ever giving ourselves away. Perhaps we’re afraid to reveal who we really are. Perhaps we wish we were somewhere else, or with someone else, or even were someone else.
We can have so many roles to play in life that we feel ripped apart. It’s easy to live as if we were fragments, mere shards of personality in a splintering social world. Yet as followers of Christ we must do what we can to pull ourselves together. And that requires living not from the surface, from our periphery, but from the deep.
In Psalm 86, David wrote: ‘Give me an undivided heart.’ He desired a whole heart in order to respond whole-heartedly to his Creator, from the very centre of his being. He longed, if you like, to live with integrity before the presence of God – as the person God truly made him to be.
God’s breath, God’s spirit, has been present with us since it hovered over the face of the waters before the world was formed. It was there in the garden, in the cool of the day, when Adam and Eve hid from it, naked and ashamed. It burned like a pillar of fire as the people wandered the desert. It lived and died as Immanuel, God with us. And it fanned the disciples’ flames at Pentecost.
God has revealed himself to the world, given himself away, fully, so that we, with unveiled, unmasked faces, may be transformed with ever-increasing glory…
And so that we, in turn, may reveal to the world who we truly are: the bearers of God’s transforming presence to those around us – our children, our friends, our partners, our colleagues, our enemies, and even ourselves.
Brian Draper
Reproduced with permission: © The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity
