Easter tells us that we are missed

Our best relationships hint at what we are really missing.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

A persons stands, holding a net curtain aside to gaze out.

Max Harlynking on Unsplash.

I never thought that God could miss me, but recently I’ve begun to wonder if he does.

Is there a person in your life that you just love spending time with? Maybe this person is a family member, a friend, colleague, neighbor, or maybe your spouse. As time has gone on in your life you now realize how special that person is to you. You think of the ease, the peace, the low heartbeat, lightheartedness, and depth of feeling that you’ve experienced all in simply being with that person and spending time with them.

As you think of that person, can you remember a time when there was a longer-than-usual gap between your visits? Maybe weeks, months, years. What was it like when you met up or talked to this special friend of yours after the hiatus? What did it feel like?

I have someone like this. His name is Andrew. He is my cousin, but I’ve generally thought of him as the brother I never had. We grew up together separated by only one year in age. My childhood is filled with memories of playing with him in different sports, games, wrestling, arguing, disagreeing, pranking each other, late-night fast-food runs, (which I no longer recommend), and eventually working long shifts on low sleep together. We were in each other’s wedding parties. We have experienced a lot of life together.

As time has gone on, and I now live on the other side of the continent, we have not been able to see each other as often as we would like.

But recently, he had a special work trip close to the Pacific Northwest, so he made time for a short stay with us near Seattle. On one day, I took him out for street tacos near the ocean and we were able to get some unhurried time to catch up. Throughout his visit I just kept thinking how much I had missed spending time with Andrew. He and I both expressed as much.

If you have just one of those friendships in life, you have hit the ball out of the park. And if you have two or three of those friendships, you’ve hit a grand slam. These friendships are unique.

For me, one of the most striking and poignant questions throughout the Bible is when God asks Adam “Where are you?”

As a theologian by education, I often think of these relational traits when it comes to God. Fundamental to Christian belief is that we can, despite how infinitely different he is to us, relate to God. There is a great deal of mystery to this idea, to be sure, but I’ve wondered long and hard what this looks like. In the long history of Christian thought, scholars, pastors, and theologians have pointed to Jesus Christ to help make sense of this massive, otherworldly concept.

The Hebrew Scriptures reveal what God is like in creation, miracles, acts of grace, displays of power and many other aspects. But when we are searching to understand how God relates to us as human beings, it is Jesus Christ who gives us the primary lens through which we can understand that quality of relationship. The interactions he has with his friends, leaders, children, and teachers are especially revealing. The way he heals people, enjoys meals with others, gives time to the outsiders, and speaks to the uptight religious types is all very instructive in how God relates to us as human beings.

Over the last few years, I have become increasingly interested in the questions that Jesus asks people. Jesus’s questions reveal to us what he is like.

“Why do you call me good?”

“Who do you say that I am?”

“Whose image is on this coin?”

“Will you also leave me?”

“What do you want me to do for you?”

These and many more have caused me to explore further the questions that God asks people because maybe his questions, sometimes more than his statements, reveal what makes him different.

For me, one of the most striking and poignant questions throughout the Bible is when God asks Adam “Where are you?” Since childhood I’ve wondered what God was doing in asking that question. God was not asking a geographical question; it’s not as though his internal GPS was confused in the garden of Eden. But if not a geography question, was God then playing an intellectual game with Adam and Eve? Perhaps, but that is increasingly doubtful, given the enormous stakes in that narrative (brokenness had just entered the world) as well as the message we read throughout the rest of the Bible: God takes people seriously.

Recently I wrote to my friend and leading Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke to see what he thought about God’s question to Adam. Perhaps you’ll find an excerpt of his answer as enlightening as I have:

The omniscient God is not asking because he does not know. He is asking a real question -- this is not a charade -- to show his involvement with Adam--both an historical and archetype of humanity -- to provoke him to engage with him in dialogue. In short, God misses his fellowship.

God is asking Adam where he is because he misses him.

Waltke’s answer to my question makes God’s question to Adam into a sign of his love for Adam, and he goes further to explain that this dialogue is “an historical and archetype of humanity”. If nothing else, it means that this is the way in which God views his relationship with us. God enjoys being with us and interacting with us. And when the relationship grows cold, he misses us.

Could it be possible that when we move away from God, he notices? He misses us?

The British writer Julian Barnes begins his poignant memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of with the words, “I do not believe in God, but I miss him.” Those words set the tone for a book in which Barnes writes about his complicated and fraught relationship with the transcendent. In his book, Barnes expresses his curiosity about what God is like. And amidst the deep and rich thoughts woven throughout the book, the reader never encounters the idea that while Barnes misses God, it might also be true that the God on the other side of the equation misses him.

To be honest, in all my thinking about God, it is just now that I am beginning to ponder the thought that when I move away from God on some level, he misses me. Could it really be possible that the God of creation misses me?

Could it be possible that when we move away from God, he notices? He misses us? God’s question to Adam, punctuated by Christ the Lord restoring the severed relationship through his death on the cross and resurrection, demonstrates God’s great capacity to love us.

As we approach Easter, wherever we might find ourselves on the spectrum of belief: whether we attend church, synagogue, temple, mosque or none; whether we have faith -- a little faith, beleaguered faith, or no faith -- the story of God asking that penetrating question to Adam and ultimately coming to us in Christ is the supreme portrait of what God is like. Easter reminds us that the nature of God’s love is such that when we walk away, God feels that loss, he misses us, and he comes looking for us.

Article

Creed

Mental Health

13 March 2024

4 min read

Have our worries changed over time?

A pep talk to teachers reveals whether our fears are age-old or not.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

In an egg box sit two eggs with faces drawn on them with marker pen. One looks worried, the other looks on.

‘You’re not going to mention the psalms!’ my colleague said. ‘Are you?’

She was doing alarmed eyes at me, the sort which show white all round. I could see why really. We were on our way to give a talk at a big secondary school in Birmingham – multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith. The sort where praying had been banned as divisive, and the wearing of crosses discouraged. Hijabs too, for that matter. Not the kind of place where you chat lightly about a part of the Christian bible, on the whole, unless you’re trying to be provocative.

I did mean to mention them though. ‘I can’t think of another example,’ I said. ‘And anyway, it’s too late now – I sent the slides through last night.’ Deep breaths.

Just to explain a little, as counsellors, my colleague and I had set up a programme of talks and workshops for schools in the area, aimed at improving mental health in the aftermath of the pandemic. We’d seen all the warnings about the ‘tsunami of mental health issues’ threatening to deluge the country and decided to take action. Recognising that we couldn’t get to every individual child who might need help, we’d focused our efforts on the adults in the schools. Steady the grown-ups and you steady the children, was our thinking. The young take their wellbeing largely from the pattern set by their elders, even in this age of smart phones and social media, and the levels of despondency were very high among teachers and school staff in our experience. Lots of people burning out and leaving the profession. Not a steadying influence then. Hence our topic for today: ‘How to feel better in difficult times’.

I was nervous as I stood in front of the large hall full of people. Several hundred of them, all ages and stages. Some looking attentive, many expressionless, a few sleepy. I could see my colleague at the end of a row near the front. She had one hand up to the side of her face and was making herself small. Great, I thought. Very reassuring. But too late now, so on we go…

I introduced myself. I introduced my colleague. I introduced our work. And then I mentioned the thing that needed no introduction. It was already familiar, a regular inhabitant – present here in the room, but also everywhere else we went: our homes, our classrooms, our friends’ houses, the streets, the supermarkets. Fear. Horrid fear, drifting through the air like smoke. I gave them some awful statistics I’d found, about the rates of anxiety and depression. About the levels of self-harm, about the fact that suicide is now the second biggest killer of children between 10 and 15. I let these sink in a bit.

Then I asked, ‘So what are we afraid of, exactly?’

It is accepted practice in all mental health disciplines to try to identify the causes of fear and face squarely up to them as that’s the only real way to defuse their power, I said. I was going to read them a list of potential causes – and while I was doing so, I’d like them to try and guess where the list had come from. Call out your guesses please.

‘Getting old,’ I started. ‘Drinking too much. Tyrants swooping on other people’s countries. Teaching our children to be better than we are…’

‘Twitter!’ someone called out.

‘Cutting down the forests. Loss of friends. Waking up sweating in the night. Other people saying awful stuff about us…’

‘This Morning!’ came another voice.

‘Feeling very alone. No sign of things getting better. Envying the rich. Death. Food being short…’

‘The news this lunch time!’

‘Plagues and pestilences. Being in despair. Cruel words. The evils of the class system. Not having work. Feeling low. Feeling weak…’

‘It’s got to be The Daily Mail,’ someone else shouted. Laughter.

I looked up. ‘Good guesses,’ I said. ‘All of them, thank you. Only they’re a bit out of date. By about four millennia, give or take!’

Surprise fizzed through the room.

I had wanted to find out what people used to worry about, I explained. To see how that differed from our current worries. I hadn’t known where to look though, until I suddenly remembered the psalms. ‘Some of you might be familiar with the psalms,’ I said, ‘but for those of you who aren’t, they are 150 ancient songs full of moaning.’ They varied in age, but the oldest were thought to have been written the best part of 4,000 years ago – making them older than the pyramids. I’d taken twenty of these songs out of the middle of the book – Psalms 60-80 – and listed the things they were moaning about… as just demonstrated.

A lot of the sleepy faces were looking more alert now.

Since this ancient list is more or less identical to our own, we can draw two conclusions, I said. Both very good news. The first is that, clearly, these are the things we worry about – if we’re human. People from a totally different culture/ period in history/ part of the world/ ethnicity/ stage of economic development/ political system/ level of education and so on and on, worrying about the same things as us? Doesn’t it show that… er, it’s normal? For living, breathing, average, sentient human beings like us?

And secondly it proves, surely, that we’re designed to survive this kind of worrying. We’re wired to cope. Our brains are built for it. Because – ta da! – here we all are, FORTY CENTURIES later, still moaning about exactly the same stuff!

I looked at my colleague again. Not only were both her hands now down in her lap, but like a lot of the rest of the room, she was smiling.

‘If we can clear fear out of the way, it’s much easier to get on with sorting out problems,’ I finished. ‘So now, shall we talk about where we can get started?’