Trinity and Humanity

I awoke this morning with a familiar ache. Not a physical pain, but an emotional one. Thirty-five years of living a lie; of believing a false reality — had etched in my heart a wound that can only be healed by repeated exposure to the truth. As I always do in the morning, I felt distant from God.

My conditioned response has been to tell myself to pursue him immediately. So my brain, in an attempt to create a plan of action, began making a spiritual to-do list. The familiar instructions came down through my mind like a sudden rainfall on an already-dreary day. I have to pray. I have to study. I have to meditate.

This time, though, the rain suddenly stopped. It was like sunlight breaking through, and I remembered, No I don’t. I remembered a truth I learned so recently that it has yet to make it into the depths of my subconscious: I am already in the midst of the family of God, right now. I could not be any closer. Then I wondered where that urgent list of tasks was coming from, much the same as when God asked Adam and Eve, “Who told you that you were naked?” I felt the Holy Spirit asking me essentially the same question– “Who told you that you were naked, devoid of my presence?”

I had to laugh on the inside. Like a long-time bachelor only recently married, I awoke thinking I was alone. Thanks to the grace of the Father, and the faith and sacrifice of his Son, and the power and love of the Holy Spirit, I was born into the family of God, adopted from before I first existed.

The crazy thing; the sad and horrible thing — is I’ve been lied to ever since the beginning. The same one who said to Eve, “You will not surely die,” has been telling me through every means available, “You are far, far from God, and he is a God who will only love you if you obey his orders. Orders, by the way, which are impossible to follow.”

As I grew up and matured a little in my faith, that lie wore through like an old, filthy rag that can no longer hold up against any resistance. It was replaced by another: “Despite your salvation by grace, you must always strain to live a righteous life and always chase after a God you can’t reach, until the day you die.” But this is just a variation on a theme. It’s the same old, “You are far from God” lie. And this lie — the same one implied when Eve was told she could not believe her Father — is as old as the human race! If you ask me, the world’s oldest profession isn’t prostitution — it’s lying! And the price is our peace, joy, and happiness, given one who won’t spend it anyway!

As light dispels darkness, the truth dispels the lie. We are close to God. We could not be any closer to our Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit than we are right this very moment. It is the truth we have always been denied. It is the most powerful bit of knowledge we can have. And that is why there has been a campaign to hide it since the beginning of time.

Do you have the truth in you? Have you let it sink deep, deep down into your psyche? Are you bathed in it daily, like you are bathed in the light, love, and glory of the family of God? Is it written in your heart? Is it coded into your DNA so it permeates every cell of your being? That’s how deep the truth goes; so must your belief of it be. It is truly the only thing that matters.

I look forward to the day when I wake up and my first thought is a true one — “Welcome to another day in the light, love, and joy of your family. You get to spend the whole day today with the three people who love you most in the universe.”

~ Steve Solari