I started reading Knowing the Face of God by Tim Stafford earlier this year. It’s an older book, one which we gleaned from the library of Mr. D’s grandpa after he didn’t need it anymore, and it’s been sitting on our shelf for years. This felt like the right time to read it. Not too far in I realized it was going to be one of those books that changes the way I think about things. I always markup books, of course, with highlights and underlines and tiny notes in the margin, but for a long, long time I have been wanting to do a much better job of recording what I am learning. Thus, I greatly slowed my reading in the book and in fact now have been waiting to continue until I get caught up on hashing out my musings. I prefer to record first impressions.

The author sets the stage by describing the struggle of wanting to know God and be in relationship with him in an undeniably real sense. He talks about the effect that others’ apparent spiritual lives and interactions with God have on one’s own sense of God; the feelings that arise when you allow yourself to go to the recesses of your mind and contemplate the questions that linger there but are not often fully formed; the longings that are often stuffed down by the realities of simply surviving everyday life. These are my words, and the reasons I sought out this book.

I have experienced times of intense connection with God where I felt my spirit fully alive and engaged in constant dialogue with him throughout my day. It is these experiences which educate my understanding of Paul’s recommendations to not marry. Marriage and subsequently children add so many more things into your mind and heart which were previously much less cluttered. It is unquestionably more difficult to find that sense of communion with God on a regular basis with all the extras floating around in one’s brain and constantly engaging all the other 5 of one’s senses in the impossible-to-ignore way that diapers and hunger and little squabbles do.

If you are not the type of personality given to connecting with your emotions like a surfer at home in the ocean, you may not understand the desire to embrace the melancholy and contemplative moments and cling  to them until you have wrung every drop of emotional high out of them. Have you ever tried to have a good cry with kids hanging on your leg, needing lunch?

You can’t very well be in your own little world and at the same time be any good in relationships. I think this may be why the most celebrated artists are often those who meet or have met with tragic ends – they seek out the intensely dark place of creativity where no one can follow, and people are not made to be alone – it is actually, then, a somewhat self-destructive state, a twisted version of creativity.

I do believe, however, that there is a place of creativity that is much more open and vulnerable and engaging. God is a creator, but he involves us in his processes, he does not turn inward and isolate. It is this journey I find myself on, of learning to throw off insecurities and the perceived comfort and gratification that isolated creativity provides, and rather join God in embracing the joy and pain of creating while being fully engaged with all the complexities of LIFE and relationships with others.

So there is this reality that feeling and interacting with God on a day-to-day basis seems to be much less an ethereal experience, and much more a volatile trusting that our present state of mind does not change who God is our relationship with him. It is simultaneously that simple and that complex. And it is this struggle of wanting more that we shall continue to explore in part 2.