Hurried - Part 2 - Looking for God on the Moon

So the morning after my last post - a post about hurrying - I resolved not to hurry so much.

I took it slow with my kids in getting them ready for school.

And something kind of weird happened. In the middle of applying sun screen on my oldest daughter we had a conversation. She started telling me about how she wished she could go into outer space and see the moon someday. Instead of the usual "that's nice", and because I was really listening, I asked her why she wanted to go out into space.

She told me that she thought maybe we could see and hear God out there.

Does anyone else find themselves at loss when trying to talk about the mysteries of God with a 6 year-old?

I tried to explain to her that we can talk to God right here right now because we're surrounded by God's presence...and that we can learn to see and hear and be more aware of God's presence, but we don't need to "go" anywhere for it to happen. The thing is that I do believe this, but...

Our separation from God (however self-imposed) is a painful reality to confront, and most of the time I avoid it. I probably even try to go places (maybe not the moon, but other places) hoping that I will find God there, instead of facing the reality that God appears to be so entirely absent at times.

And maybe they're not even physical places I go to "find" God sometimes, but places in my own mind. They're mental places that involve being good enough, or happy enough, or spiritual enough, or right enough; places that I think God will finally release me from exile if I just do a certain thing.

But in a sense we are in exile in this life, and perhaps we need to embrace our exiled status and be honest with ourselves and each other. I think my efforts to locate God in a specific physical place or state of mind leave me disappointed and feeling more isolated. Perhaps that's one reason why so many of us find church services so difficult. God is there, but He/She/It is not something we can conjure up whenever it suits us.

I told my daughter that seeing and hearing God is a mystery to me. I don't think we need to go into outer space, but we do need to keep wrestling with the mystery. Waiting to experience, but not straining so hard that we create something false or miss God altogether.

Searching, listening, looking, being open...

and of course,

not being in too much of a hurry.