“Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me, when his lamp shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness.” Job 29:2-3
Last week I saw an infomercial on a local Puebla, Mexico T.V. station, and I quickly realized that marketing and advertising strategies do not change no matter the country you live in. The product was a weight loss pill, and the sales tool was before and after photos. Men and women that were once heavy were now slim and trim. But what was gratuitous in the photos were their faces. In all the before photos their faces were sour and unhappy. Yet in the after photos, they were beaming with joy. The subliminal message being, the new you will be happier than the old you. And it is within this twisted thinking that many humans operate. I was happier then. It was better when I lived there. It was better then; those were the good ol’ days. We have a nasty tendency to judge, rank, and esteem the phases of our life as better or worse than others. So why should it be any different as a Christ follower looks back on their walk with Jesus? Except when we judge the closeness of our walk with Christ, why do we always assume that as we strayed from that closeness, that God was the one that moved? And it is in this fallacious reasoning that we play the proximity game. And the fictitious rules of the proximity game state that the better we are, the closer God is…and the worse we are, the farther God is.
We see Job with the board game of “Proximity” spread out before him in chapter 29. And he is playing it with all his might. Job’s entire monologue is based on self and within it he sells himself just like that infomercial. He looks back upon the good ol’ days when all was right in his world, and he erroneously assimilates the fact that God was close. Yet now in his current, down-trodden dilemma, Job incorrectly assumes that God is ever so distant. You see, Job, just as all humans can do, directly correlated his current situation to God’s proximity. If all is going well for me, I’m healthy, have plenty of money, and love everything about my life, then God therefore must be close, watching over me, and carefully orchestrating all the important details of my life to keep things just the way I like them. Yet on the flip side of that coin, if we are dealing with disease, loss of loved ones, or trouble at home with the kids or spouse, we jump to the conclusion that God must be napping on the job, faraway and oblivious. As we choose to roll the dice of “Proximity”, we can fall into the falsehood of assuming that our circumstances dictate the location of God. Folks, nothing has ever been so false.
I love the poem “Footprints.” If you haven’t read it lately, take a few minutes, google it, and refresh its message in your mind. The story is that as an individual reviewed their life with Christ that the footprints in the sand shifted back and forth from one set of footprints to two. The natural tendency of the person was to assume that as things got bad in their life, God bailed on them. Yet as is revealed in the last stanza, Christ had never left, in fact the lone set of prints was because He was carrying them through the burden. Folks, today, no matter where you perceive God is, He is close. You may be suffering through cancer or countless operations; God is ever so close to you. You may be dealing with the bitter loss of a spouse, child, or parent, God has not moved away, but inched even closer. Today, don’t allow your circumstances to dictate the proximity of God. Claim His promise that He is always close to you and continue to vigilantly cry out to Him in the confidence that His ears will hear your cry. For just when you feel that God is distant, it could be that later you look back and realize He was carrying you the entire time.
“The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; He delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Psalms 34:17-18
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