without oxygen.

I've been realizing lately that I miss God.

I know. How could that be? I pray. I read the Bible. I clock some hours at the church. I talk with Christian friends about Christian things.

I miss God?

Yeah. Yeah, I do.

My pastor has been on a tear recently about grace, and when I hear him preach about how God chose me, and planned for me, and adopted me, I want to fall to my knees. I want to shout out my praise and prayers alike. I want to cry. I want to live fully in the grace he's preaching, the grace He's giving. Literally, I sit in production, watching the sermon on the monitors, hoping that my friends around me don't notice that my eyes are glossy, that my heart is out in the open.

I'm being too honest. My heart is out in the open here as well.

Maybe it's not that I miss God, as much as it is that I'm learning Him newly. I'm finding something different, something deeper than I've known.

Makes sense. I've noticed a pattern in my faith. My periods of new growth and greater faith are almost always immediately preceded by some of the worst moments of doubt. This is no exception. A couple of posts back, I openly admit to my troubles with the atonement. Now, I'm telling you that my heart is breaking for God. It can't contain the desire, or the reality.

My difficulties with the intellectual aspects of the atonement are being met with a heart-breaking awareness of His love.

Before I accepted Christ, actually for as long as I can remember, I would periodically see this one image in my mind--waking and asleep. From darkness would come a set of scenes, racing across my mind's eye, over dozens of different terrains, and all of time. It was like watching a time-lapse movie, in milliseconds. Then, suddenly the images would stop short, a complete collision, in an eyeball. And the view of the eyeball would widen until I saw that the eye was in a face--Christ's face, while His body hung from the cross. The message was clear-- I've known you from the beginning of time, and I've known this moment from the beginning of time, and I have always planned on dying for you, and even if there were no others, for you alone.

I've seen this so many times, I can't count. I don't remember the first time, I've just known it for as long as I can remember. I've seen it day-dreaming. I've seen it in my sleep. And until recently, I assumed I had seen the image in a movie or something--that it's presence in my mind had been entirely impersonal, and meaningless.

Now, I cannot believe that it is meaningless or random.

I "miss" God because my heart is His. Because my commitment to Christ can't allow me to live as though I'd never made it. I can no more live without God as I can live without oxygen.