H,
The feeling of emptiness is
what so easily leads us astray. It comes to me in the morning, mostly. I get
out of bed with some effort. I need to arrange my thoughts, still my heart and
remember myself. I need to write stuff down. If I do not then I am in the
thrall of my own doubts and fears and wants and weaknesses.
In the end, there is no one
day cure for feeling cut off from the divine. The truth is made manifest over
the many days of a full life. You do not need the closeness of God on the first
day you give your life over to Him. You need it for every day after.
The tide changes. The presence
seems to fade but the deeper you go, the closer He is with no physical signs to
support it. The early days of sweetness and spirit give in to tedium and the
weight of living.
The thing to always remember
is to do whatever you can daily to remind yourself that you are not empty and
are not estranged from your father anymore. The great book gives us some solid
advice: prayer, study, fellowship and the expression of our oft declared love
for God in being kind, patient, gentle, forgiving of others like us, stuck on
this plane till Kingdom come. You cannot take these things as rules to follow
though. That will always trip you up. Worse still, you must not make a check
list of the life in God.
It all must come from the
spirit. We must always connect. We pray so we can connect. We pray so we can
become all the things He knows we can be. We pray to talk, to say we do not
understand, to strip off weights and take on strength. There is no other way. Proximity
to the rising sun will chase away the dark. There is no other way.
And oh, you will fall many
times. This is not a perfect trajectory. The thing you will struggle with the
most is dealing with your own failure. Yet, this the trick. This is the whole
thing. There is no shortcut to glory. Your struggle in the dark is necessary. It
makes it possible for you to let go of the fiction you have about your own
basic goodness. The light comes to end the dark. It always starts with your
own. Come back to it when you fall. Dust off the floor and kneel again. This is
the power of the blood of Christ. Guard your heart. Do not let anything in that
tells you it is better to give in and die than to live forever. Love is
eternal, sin is not. We shall overcome. He already has. We are His disciples. When
we speak His word, we are His apostles. We are His, so we cannot fail.  

The light has come to end
the dark.