Ten Thousand Returns

"...we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." - 2 Corinthians 4:16 NIV

You know that feeling when you have let the gym go for a month and find yourself in the parking lot trying to talk yourself back in. The hardest part is never the workout. It is the return, the suspicion that too much time has passed. But the second return is easier, the third easier still, until going back feels more natural than staying away.

That same pull lives in what we might call the interior life, that quiet place beneath the surface of the day where we sense God is near. We begin to notice something there and put words to what it actually is. Then it fades and we are back in the parking lot. But God says simply, "...do not dwell on the past." Isaiah 43:18.

And then His very next word: "...do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland." Isaiah 43:19. He is not waiting for us to be ready but for us to notice what He is already doing. That promise goes to the desert, not the garden. God meets the one who comes back.

A French monk named Brother Lawrence spent thirty years practicing the presence of God, and thirty years of finding it gone, starting over, beginning again and again as the day required. The Apostle Paul calls this the ordinary shape of the life of faith, "...renewed day by day," 2 Corinthians 4:16, fresh every morning, the returning woven into the design long before we thought to ask.

The prophet Elijah knew the same parking lot hesitation. He had given everything he had and collapsed asking God to let him quit. Yet instead, He restored him quietly and spoke not in thunder but in, "...a gentle whisper." 1 Kings 19:12. God brought him back.

In those seasons when God feels distant and the practice feels dry, something surfaces. Paul says our struggles are "...achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." 2 Corinthians 4:17. The dry seasons are not empty. A hunger rises in them, something older and truer than what we thought we were seeking, and it knows the way home.

So we walk back in. The first time costs something. The tenth time costs less. The practice of returning, offered without shame, is what forms us, the door a little more familiar each time. We were not made for the holding on but for the coming back. "...we do not lose heart," 2 Corinthians 4:16, because what we are returning to has not moved. Come and see.

Prayer

Lord, from the first noticing to the naming, to this long practice of returning, You have been present and faithful at every point. Teach us to begin again, to trust the way back You have made, and rest in a patience deep as the hunger You placed in us. Amen.