The Hitchhiker’s Guide (19b): The Watcher Part 2
You too, be ready; because the Son of Man is coming at an hour that you do not think He will.” Luke 12:40 NASB
Be ready – The March 29 edition of My Utmost for His Highest could have been written by Moses Luzzatto rather than Oswald Chambers (with a few corrections for Christian vocabulary). Chambers makes the point that “the battle is not against sin or difficulties or circumstances, but against being so absorbed in work that we are not ready to face Jesus Christ at every turn.”[1] Our failure is immersion in everything except awareness of God’s constant presence. In one sense, it’s inevitable. We’re built to survive and surviving means paying attention to the yetzer ha’ra desire to keep us breathing, safe, nourished, and in control. It takes significant effort to consciously notice the invisible hand of God in all our circumstances. But it’s an effort worth making because it turns the world from a threat into the joy of fellowship with the Creator.
Chambers exhorts us to avoid “the call of the religious age you live in.” Luzzatto does the same. Practice the disciple of omnipresence. In the next moment, consciously recognize that God is right here, seeing what you see, feeling what you feel, knowing you thoroughly. What is that like for you? Comforting? Intimidating? Condemning? Relieving? Satisfying? Feel the experience of omnipresence and ask yourself, “What do my emotions tell me right now?” “What do they say about my connection with the God Who is at hand?” Then consider this:
“What we want to attain in the course of the heshbon [intelligence] that yirah requires is a transformation of our relationship to time. . . the yetzer ha-ra attempts to enchain us to the present. In the present, the ‘time’ in which there is neither past nor future, we are alone, and therefore concerned only with ourselves. But true yirah requires us to break the chains of the present . . . The first step in this process is to couple the present with the future, recognizing that the present is essentially false, a construct conceivable only in the abstract case where time is ‘stopped.’ But time does not stop; every second is a gesture toward the future, lived as a transition from past to future. The future is the opening accomplished within us at the approach of the other because the other breaks through our self-absorption, which is our enchainment to the present. The past, then, is the record of our exposure to the other, extended infinitely backward, which describes the consciousness of obligation that accompanies our development as individuals.”[2]
Meditation on omnipresence is not “freezing the moment.” It is the realization that this moment is a calling from the next, that this moment exists only in relation to God’s promise before us, to become our intended design. Omnipresence is not God surrounding us but rather God beckoning us, a divine hand extended from the ‘olam ha’ba waiting for us to grasp what is yet to come—and live accordingly.
Step 19b: Practice omnipresence as a calling.
Topical Index: ready, omnipresence, meditation, calling, Luke 12:40
[1] Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (Welch Publishing Company), p. 89.
[2] Ira F. Stone, in Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Upright, p. 262.
