"Gravity"

"Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it." - Jacob after his famous dream.

How often do I stop and recognize God? In the rich sounding potato-chip crunch of a leaf underfoot or the vibrant green hues of spring awakenings, do I truly marvel at God's creation?

I was reminded of these questions while reading Voskamp this morning. And wow, how something does stir in my passions to recognize God in his creation!

She went on to describe how the root word for God's glory is "Kavod," which stems from the same word that means weight. God's weight is in all of his natural world. "The whole world is full of his glory." The whole world is weighted down by God.

Just as Jacob awoke to a recognition of his own cluelessness to God's presence, perhaps I too am clueless to God's weight in the world. The clean smell of air after a spring rain, the rich combination of warm breezes and misting rain. He's here. He's in this place. And this place is weighted down by God.

One of my favorite things to do is what I've termed "Gravity." Maybe it is some deep psychological need I have to feel permanent, but I'll often ask Melissa to lay down on top of me, dispersing her weight over my entire body. I don't know why but the weight soothes my anxieties and fears, its pressure on my lungs forces me to slow down, and I feel secure, anchored. Strange I know, but there's something about being pressed upon by goodness, or in my case gently flattened by one I love (Melissa's way too light for really good Gravity), that speaks of glory. Surely God is in Gravity.

Life doesn't require that we slow down. But God-life does. We are such a furious hurry-riddled, helter-skelter and gruesome-pictures-of-decapitated-chickenes-running-into-stuff-because-someone-thought-this-would-make-a-good-analogy kind of people aren't we. Even those of us who, when faced with the onslaught of evil that is our day, groan, roll over and hug our pillow in shivering terror, are in the grip of something else: weightlessness.

Of course, as with anything ever written of any substance, greedy old CS Lewis got to it first in "The Weight of Glory." And also as with anything ever written of any profound substance, I have stored it somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, the part that's always taking recesses. So go ahead and read "The Weight of Glory" and insert your own profound thoughts here.

But as I contemplate my day, with the stupid hurly-burly-want-to-bang-my-head-against-stuff (I-really-like-dashes-today) kind of things I have to do, I'm hoping that I'll recognize along with Voskamp, that the world is saturated with God and weighed down by his presence.

"Don't pull that weed, Melissa, that might be one of God's chin hairs!"