that never wanting to be apart
“Do you think this is the hardest part, really, this anticipation?” Zoe squints a little, looking at me as she asks this. In her blue eyes I see a sliver-sharp stretch of sky.
We sit on the back porch on a Sunday afternoon, Kevin and Zoe and me, all of us restless and melancholy, sad with looming absences. It’s a heavy hard thing, knowing that soon you’ll not be within arm’s reach of each other, that it’ll be at least a month until you feel beneath your fingertips the warmth of someone you love, until you can wrap your arms around them and for a moment catch the rhythm of heart and breath. Never mind that the breeze gently lifts our hair now and grazes our arms and legs, our cheeks, with the crisp-light gaze of Fall coming, just cresting the horizon in the distance; never mind that the sun dapples the grass in golds. We can really only watch each other, like sentinels.
I just wish I could go with you, just be there a little while—that’s what I want to say to Zoe, the only articulation really for the ache pressing down so hard on my heart I can barely breathe. I’ll wind up telling her this, but not just yet.
“Do you think it’ll be better after I just get there?” She asks, and I can guess she’s also wondering when she’ll be able to take full breaths again.
My breath catches: the waiting enlarges, but it also hurts.
I nod, say only, “Yes, I think so,” though I can also feel that there will be soreness, grief.
I keep thinking about cruciform living—the arms outstretched, releasing and reaching at the same time. I keep remembering that in Christ’s day, victims of Roman crucifixion often died from asphyxiation. I keep acknowledging that while the idea of being apart feels crushing, because of Him we never really have to suffocate with separation. Jesus really couldn’t breathe on the cross, but I, in mimicking Him with my tiny sacrifices, always finally get to fully live, just feeling–so briefly, really, along the way–a little short-of-breath.
Zoe is a missionary given by God’s grace a ministry, and maybe that’s why I turn over, lightly now in my mind, Paul’s departure from the Ephesian church, as it is described in the Bible in the book of Acts. They wept as they embraced and kissed him, but they also grieved the fact that they would likely never see his face again. They knew, by way of prophecy and conviction, that Paul was setting out on what could very well end up being a death march to Jerusalem. Luke describes this leaving as a tearing away, and certainly right now, I feel torn. But also, we’ve been feeling thankful, Kevin and Zoe and me, listing blessings aloud as we rock gently in our chairs, one of them being that we will not be without ways to see each other or without ways to talk and share and hear each other, another that the distance geographically, though more than we’ve experienced before, is a matter of a few hours by plane.
Maybe all this seems a bit dramatic on our part, except that just now I am freshly aware that love bonds and attaches and unifies, drawing and tying us together, that part of loving is, as God has repeatedly expressed, the desire to be together. If we do not wish to abide, not only to share a space but to live our lives in community, we do not love each other.
Indeed, God’s desire to dwell with His people propels the metanarrative, the big story, of the Bible and all that He does, and Christ articulates love this way Himself just before going to the cross, praying not only for His disciples but for all who would follow later, “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am.”
The ache we feel now exists only in dim reflection of the longing of God’s hesed, His steadfast, enduring love for us, only draws us toward the hope of eternal union with God and each other, and so, only points, gratefully now I see it, to the entire reason for Zoe’s missionary ministry in Boston.
Kevin says to Zoe, “Should we pray with you? Do you want to pray?”
She nods, readily saying, yes, please, moves immediately to sit up and turn her attention higher.
When it’s my turn to pray, I am thanking God, telling Him I feel as though in this deep mama-longing to go with, to be with, to watch over, He has given me just the tiniest glimpse of the sweeping, conquering, never departing love He has for absolutely everyone, including me. I am broken, thanking Him for a love so vast that He would sacrifice Himself to be with us, to never leave us, to watch over us and bring us home.
“I get it just a little tiny bit more,” I’m telling God, “because you know how much I wish, even knowing how completely competent you’ve made Zoe, even knowing that you are with her and will not leave her or fail to care for her, that I could also be within arm’s reach, could will the world to treat her gently and kindly.”
I am not actually so eloquent in the moment, not really, not with tears swelling and sliding slowly, but this is what I feel deeply, what I say with my words and my body, if somewhat more awkwardly aloud, my feet pressed into the wood plank floor of the porch, my back bowed by the weight of the moment, still more by the weight of glory.
Prayer is not a monologue but a conversation, and right here, right now, God responds, telling me that the longing for withness I feel, the light and momentary pain I suffer, is only the tiniest fraction of His own longing, His own grief for those still estranged.
He says, I know. I understand.
Because this love you feel, this is the why compelling and propelling everything.
