Holy Week for the Hesitant Ones
It's not too late. It hasn't been too long. Come home, come home.
This morning I dropped the kids off at daycare and, as I always do, said a little prayer as I reversed the car and watched the kids shrug off their coats and set out to play.
“Lord, be with all the kids at daycare today. Protect them and keep them healthy and nurtured. Let them have fun together. Oh, and PLEASE help Viv and Theo be kind to their friends and listen to the adults. Please?!”
The prayer itself wasn’t different than it usually is, but as I said it, I realized there wasn’t much more to it than a mother’s nervous repetitions. It was half-hearted, like I had been walking up to the Lord but then, wondering along the way whether it was actually a good idea, faltered. So I muttered my requests self-consciously, and heard them bounce around the car, boinging about willy-nilly like the armfuls of water bottles and toys the kids have dropped from their carseats.
It made me pause. When had that begun, my hesitancy to talk to God? And why?
In truth, I have been distracted lately. I got home Sunday from a trip with girlfriends from Phoenix, which was full and fantastic and dreamy and exhausting. The kids and I have been sick off and on, so our lovely Saturday trips to the library have been mostly replaced by visits to the walk-in clinic and swings by the pharmacy for antibiotics. And on the days that I have been home and feeling well, I’ve been rushing from one task to the next, trying to complete work projects and keep our home at least nominally clean.
And, like a friend I’ve fallen out of touch with, I’ve thought of God often and with longing, but, as more and more time goes by between each of our meaningful interactions, I’ve been increasingly hesitant to approach him.
“It’s been too long, now,” I’ve begun to think. “We’ve missed too much. There’s too much ground to cover. And it will be awkward; I should have reached out sooner.”
This, of course, is the way I think about my earthly friendships. Don’t we all, as we grow older, have people we were once close with who have now grown so distant we’d feel self-conscious even approaching them? We worry that if we did, we’d discover they’re angry with us for letting so much time pass, or that they’ve changed drastically, or, worst of all, that they’ve moved on with their lives and they simply don’t need or want us anymore.
It is such a subconscious little slip to allow our relationship with God to be shaped by the successes and failures of our own relationships with other humans.
If we have learned that people only value us when we work hard, we might believe God will value us only when we work hard, too.
If we’ve experienced conditional love from our spouses, we believe God can only love us when we do things just right, too.
If we’ve ever felt rejected or isolated from a group of friends, we can believe God might turn his back on us at any minute, too.
I slip into these little cycles of thinking without even noticing them all the time, and it takes moments like this morning for me to stop and realize, “Whoa! I’m far from God. I’m hesitant to even talk to him. What’s up with that? What am I believing that may not be true?”
It is such a subconscious little slip to allow our relationship with God to be shaped by the successes and failures of our own relationships with other humans.
This week is Holy Week. Honestly, my thoughts have been more on unpacking my suitcase and vacuuming the floor and posting on social media than they have been on Jesus. Jesus, riding into Jerusalem on a young donkey. Jesus, dipping bread into wine with his disciples. Jesus, washing feet and praying to his father. Jesus, being beaten and wearing thorns and hanging on a cross, all with a love so impenetrable that nothing could make him waver from doing exactly what he came to do: saving us from our sin and death. Making us free.
I was tempted this morning not to draw near to Jesus. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I felt like I wasn’t worthy to be close to him. Him, so perfect. Me, so consumed by my selfishness. My experiences with other people told me that he might turn away from me, or cross his arms and say, “You’re too late.”
But in my mind, that verse: “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 1
I forget, when I compare Jesus to people I know, that he is not at all limited in his capacity for love. It is only my capacity to understand his love that’s limited.
See, I have a hard time understanding a God who would choose to be made small and dusty and physically breakable in order to do the one thing that scares all of us humans most: die. I have an even harder time believing that he would do it for me. And I have the hardest time of all believing that he could forgive me for forgetting it, and for spending most of my time caring about meaningless things like my social media presence or the gray hairs popping up all over my head.
I forget, when I compare Jesus to people I know, that he is not at all limited in his capacity for love. It is only my capacity to understand his love that’s limited.
But that’s where God distinguishes himself from humanity. His love is at such a different caliber that all we can do is gaze at him in wonder and bask in it, allowing it to soak into our pores as a holy gift.
This week—this Holy Week—no matter whether we talked to God this morning or last month or ten years ago or never before, let’s remember that his love exceeds all understanding, his passion for us is positively relentless, and that he’s not limited to our conditional, human standards for relationships. He is more and he is better, and he’s saying, “Come home now. Come home.”
Romans 5:8