From The Nearness

The Opening Letter

Dear friend,

In His presence is fullness of joy.

That sentence is three thousand years old, and it is the reason this letter exists. Before you weigh it, before you decide whether it could possibly be about you, let it sit a moment exactly as it is. Not advice, not a demand, but a report. Someone stood somewhere, once, and found that being with God was not one more obligation in a crowded life. It was the fullness his whole life had been circling.

You have been circling it too. It is why you picked this up, whether you would have put it that way or not.

You are tired in a way sleep doesn’t reach. Not the tiredness of doing too much, exactly, but of being too much — too visible and not truly seen, always reachable, always presented, curating even your casualness. Somewhere along the way, life became a stage whose lights never go all the way down. And the part of you that longs to be simply known, free of production and editing and the good angle, has learned to keep quiet. But it has not died. It aches at odd hours. It aches mid-scroll, in the pause after the noise stops, in the strange loneliness that follows the very things that promised connection. If you are honest, you have felt it even at church, on the Sundays when the volume seemed to drown the very whisper you came for.

We know this ache, all of us, and we have grown skilled at feeding it everything except the one thing it wants. Underneath it, quieter than everything and patient as roots, there is a leaning. A tilt of the soul toward Someone. You may never have said it out loud. Say it now, at least inwardly, because nothing in these pages will make sense until it is admitted. What you have wanted, under everything you have wanted, is God. Not information about Him. Not a technique for reaching Him. Not even the life He might arrange for you. Him.

Now here is the news this letter carries, and it is almost too kind to be believed. That wanting did not begin with you.

Long before you leaned toward Him, He leaned toward you. The old Scripture says His eyes run to and fro throughout the whole earth. Searching eyes, a Father’s eyes, moving through the crowd for a face He loves. They were never scanning past you toward someone more impressive. You were never auditioning. You were being sought. The hunger you thought was your own idea is the echo of His. He wanted first.

And this changes the shape of everything. Because it means the life you were made for is not somewhere ahead of you, waiting to be earned. It is beside you, waiting to be entered.

There is a nearness of God. Real, present, unadvertised. Closer than the room you are sitting in, open at this hour, in the middle of your unfinished, distracted, thoroughly ordinary life. The quiet souls of every century have found it and tried to tell us. A cook found it among his pots and pans; a plowboy found it with his eyes on the furrow and his thoughts on God; a mother of nineteen found it under the apron she threw over her head, because that was the only sanctuary her house had; a Bible teacher kept an empty chair by the kitchen stove because the Friend who met him there sometimes came at half past two in the morning. The cook said it plainly, three centuries ago. “He is nearer to us than we are aware of.” These pages will call it what it is — the Nearness — because it is not a place you travel to and not a state you achieve. It is Him. Near. And the whole of the Christian life, the entire thing, is learning to live there.

So let this letter say plainly, once, what every letter after it will only unfold. The Christian life is not a life lived for God with communion as its reward. Being with Him — wanted, welcomed, near — is the life. It is not earned but entered. And you were sought before you ever sought Him. He has been near the whole time, and the joy you have chased through everything else is simply His face, already turned toward you.

Nothing here will hand you a ladder. There is no ladder. Whatever you have been told, God is not waiting at the top of your best efforts to see whether you make it. The door was opened from His side — brought near by the blood of Christ, the old letter says — so there is nothing left to earn; there is only Someone to be with. He is already in the room. Nearer than you dared believe, and gladder to have you than you dared hope. There is a cost; these pages will not lie to you about that. But it comes later, and it comes the way the man in the old story sold everything he had for one unremarkable field. In joy, because of what he had found buried in it.

So, dear friend, before the first letter, one small thing. When you reach the end of this sentence, set the book down. And without ceremony, without fixing anything first, without finding the right words, turn. Not your body. Your attention. Toward Him.

He has been looking at you with kindness for a long time.

In His presence is fullness of joy. Come and see.