Daily Manna · Day 254 · September 11
Never Far Away
“That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:”
Nearness is not a feeling. It is a fact about distance.
Paul says this on Mars' hill to a city that had raised an altar to a god it could not name. Feel after him is a groping word, the way a man crosses a dark room with his hands out in front of him. Paul does not tell the Athenians they are wrong to grope. He tells them what is true while they are doing it: though he be not far from every one of us. He does not say they had found God. He says the distance was never what stood in the way.
Lord, I have been groping and filing it under failure. I have gone looking for the door you must have left by and there is no door. You are not far from me at the sink, in the car, in the room where I cannot feel a thing. I have been asking you to come closer, which turns out to be the wrong request. I am asking instead to be told the truth about where I am already standing.
And when the feeling does not come this week, and it may not, which will you believe: the room, or the text?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 254 is Past Finding Out (Romans 11:33).