The Nearness of God is My Good

...like it was for my brother David before me.

Love is
The funeral pyre

Where I have laid my living body.

All the false notions of myself
That once caused fear, pain,

Have turned to ash
As I neared God.

— Hafiz

David said it, too, all those years ago:

“The nearness of God is my good.”

If I hadn't heard that, if he had never said it, my life would be destroyed by now. I would very likely be long dead. But I did hear it, thank God. I latched onto it like a piece of driftwood next to a man lost at sea. How do you justify the decision to go on living when you believe there is no goodness in you? You commit your miserable life to getting near God. If you can just get near God, you reason, then you will have goodness. He will be your goodness.

It was that simple, desperate belief that saved me. I came near to God, and he came near to me, and there, in his presence, he commanded me to die. I thought he meant to burn me like a broken toy upon the fire that warms the hearts of others. I thought, through tears, it's good enough for me to be consumed by God in this way, to be used as a sacrifice. I’m not worth saving, I thought, but perhaps in my destruction I can somehow bring him glory. Perhaps in the sacrifice of my miserable life, I can touch true goodness.

But I was wrong about all that. 

God didn't want me to die. He just wanted me to die to all I was never meant to be. It's just that when he commanded me to lay all of that on the pyre, I believed that all of that was all I truly was. It wasn't until it all got burned away—a slow, horrible consumption—on the pyre of his love that I first saw that there was more to me than all the brokenness I had lived. There was a deeper me, wrought by a deeper magic than any of the darkness of this world can touch, a me that was born of the dream of God’s own heart. The real me. The true me.

And I was born again.

This gospel is lost in every generation, buried under the shallow machinations of religious men consumed by fear and the lust for control. And in every generation, it is rediscovered by lost souls on the fringes of the world, broken misfits and tainted goods desperate enough to believe there might be a little redemption even for them.

I was one of the lucky ones. Like Jesus said, “He who has been forgiven much, loves much.” I was one of those. And now, by God’s grace, I am one of his.