Floundering
Sometimes a human life can seem no more meaningful than a fish flopping on a shore. Writhing. Out of its element. And I would love to tell you that the real problem in life is we believe we are writhing when we aren’t, but that’s not true. My spirituality, that is Christian spirituality, doesn’t tell me to close my eyes and pretend life is beautiful and there are no problems to confront. I’m told, instead, I am out of water, and if I want to find water again, I must go in search of a different kind of water. All of us have been washed on the shore. We all have issues, we are all broken. The brokenness we experience, the brokenness that mingles in our DNA, is a kind of fallout from the fall of man. Men and women were made to be in relationship with God, but because of the fall of man, we aren’t.
The Scripture that states if an earthly father knows how provide for his children, how much more God knows how to provide for his speaks volumes in its antithesis, too: if an earthly father abandons his children and wrecks their lives. how much more would an abandonment from God destroy a human? As I look at humanity, I can only describe the human personality as designed for a relationship with something from which it has been separated. I hear it in conversations, read it in books, listen to it in music, interpret it through psychology, and so on and so on. The idea of this separation has come to feel obvious to me.
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God did not leave because he wanted to; he left because he had to. His nature defines good, and people wanted something he didn’t want. He separated himself from us but he didn’t abandon us.
Donald Miller – Father Fiction
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