It is out of the heart’s cavernous longing and furious search
for love, significance, acceptance, approval, identity, security,
freedom, belonging, innocence, intimacy and transcendence—
out of its primordial memory of what was lost to us in the Garden—
that we begin to erect idols for ourselves.
Unconsciously we hope they might restore to us a taste of paradise,
taking away our fear and shame and isolation.
We yearn to go back but, alas, we cannot get in from there.
We ache to connect to beauty, to be desired by it as much as we desire it,
and Jesus is the only door by which we may enter.
He is the Beauty, and all the rest are simply there like pealing bells
to arouse our hearts to Him and tell us that He is coming for us.
Still, as if we haven’t quite yet heard and believed the message, we keep
aimlessly trying to forge a false righteousness through our false gods.
When they are lost or the dreams of them unrealized we are devastated,
for the shadows, echoes and reflections we had supposed would finally
make us feel good about ourselves have been exposed as frauds,
and once again we are left to feel naked but without fig leaves to cover us.
It is at these precise moments, when the bottom of our false hope falls out,
that we are best prepared to encounter Christ in His intimate
fullness and most apt to recognize at last that He alone is
everything we have been so desperately wanting.
It is our boiling point, where the unbearable weight
of failed expectation so crashes in on us that we are finally
begging God to lift our idols off of us and deliver us from them,
pleading with Him to come and capture us,
crying out to Him to possess us fully.