“If you could literally see incarnate Jesus walking by right now, would you shout to get His attention, walk over and tap Him on the shoulder, or just hope He noticed you?”
When I read that question in Lisa Harper’s Untamed, my response instantly came to mind: “I’d run right up to Him and throw my arms around His neck.”
It’s amazing that such gentle words can pack such a big punch, but the next words that came to mind hit me like a locomotive: “Then why aren’t you doing that now?”
Oh.
Well.
It’s easy to view the incarnate Jesus as different than the Jesus I love and serve today. The incarnate Jesus seems so real. So physical. So intimate. But my Jesus… Sometimes He seems so distant. So hard to reach. So very far away.
One of the students in my youth ministry recently posed the question, “Why do people struggle with wanting to know if God is here or there? He’s God. Can’t He be in both places?” Bless the logic of that high school boy; he’s absolutely right. So why is it so much easier to see God as some distant figure who resides in the cosmos rather than the very real being who is alive and at work in our world today?
I chastise myself because I know that God is present in this moment. I know that He is closer than my next cry and more real than the air I breathe. In my mind, I know these things. So why is it so hard to make the connection in my heart?
Perhaps it’s because God feels so far away. Perhaps it’s because it feels like He isn’t answering my cries and I rarely think about the fact that I’m breathing. In my heart, I feel as if He’s so far away. But I know that He isn’t.
The invitation stands in this moment just as sure as it did when God asked me this morning: “Why aren’t you doing that now?”
So I stand in the presence of a God who is more real than flesh and blood, open up my heart, and abandon myself to His love.
Ever since I read Shannon Kubiak Primicerio’s The Divine Dance, I’ve been enthralled by a dancing God. It’s the language God and I speak to each other. Still, I’ve always envisioned Jesus as a Carpenter. I think of the way He molds and shapes us into the image He envisioned us to be from the beginning. And I felt as if that image had just been placed in my hands, a permanent reminder of the person God is continually shaping me to be.
And while you may not ever see the fruit of your labor, you’re touching more people than you know.
For most of my life, my morning consisted of throwing on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, running a brush through my hair, looking in the mirror and saying, “Eh, God said that it was good.” Perhaps you would never look at me and think that I was insecure. After all, I never buried my flaws under a pile of make-up. But deep in my heart, the root of the problem was the same. I was never more than “good enough.” But then I wondered…
Because that’s where He beckons me with words all too similar to the ones Tinkerbell spoke to Peter Pan in Hook:
A friend of mine recently wrote a blog post about unearthing new ground. Now, maybe it’s partially because I witnessed some of these struggles Mandy wrote of uprooting, but I found myself deeply moved by her post. You can read the whole thing 
Beyond Waiting 