seu0122Because of circumstances beyond my control, I am temporarily cut off from the letters of a friend, someone I am accustomed to hearing from several times a week. The effect has surprised me — a kind of withering of my soul, a creeping doubt about his affections. It’s silly and groundless because I have copious reasons for assurance. But there is something about having no word from him daily that is vaguely unsettling.

This makes me appreciate the kindness and wisdom of God in leaving us his Word. Relationship is relationship. It is true with God as with my flesh and blood friend that when I am bereft, for whatever reason, of hearing from Him for a stretch of days, the cobwebs of doubt start to gather. It is insidious, and happens even as I am at first vainly imagining that the deprivation makes little difference to me.

It’s only when I go back to meeting Him in Scripture every morning that I see what I have missed by my neglect. I see how the imagination had started to fashion pale fictions of the mind in place of the real God. I see how needy is my soul for his iconoclastic presence, and to hear him say the words “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”