Tilted Toward God
"Mom!" Clayton called, "You've got to check this out. You will think it's cool." He then directed me to the neat line of containers on our deck.
Months earlier, he'd planted a row of vegetables and herbs in oblong planters and placed them along the railing. He had been babying these little sprouts for weeks, and they were finally responding! I placed my hand gently upon some rosemary as he explained what I would think was so cool. "They're all growing toward the sun," he said. "The plants are tilting!"
It was true. I felt each sprout, stalk, and cluster. Every part of the plant was tilting as if to reach the sun, and then sat resting in the sun's warm embrace. Horticulturalists know better than I that plants gravitate toward the sun for nourishment, and this ultimately directs their growth. We are much the same. The shape and curve of our lives is dictated by what holds our focus and whom we choose to worship. What we stretch toward influences how we grow.
It may appear a slanted plant is unstable at best, but it is designed to draw itself sunward, and in its tilted and dependent state, it is completely filled with the sun. There, it is most stable.
We were designed to stretch toward God. We were meant to need Him so that our very life depends on Him. The ancient church father, Augustine of Hippo, put it this way in his confessions: "You made us tilted toward you, and our heart is unstable until stabilized in you."
I think my times of emotional shakiness, my tinges of insecurity, and my episodes of painful self-awareness are the unstabilizing effects of focusing inward, rather than stretching my very soul toward the Son.
I grow emotionally precarious and spiritually anemic when I turn my gaze inward and sink my roots deeper into my own soil. A soul cannot thrive when willingly isolating itself from the Son who can nourish it deeply.
God's light is so compelling that when we look outside ourselves to glimpse it, we are drawn to stretch toward Him. The writer of Song of Solomon penned this plea: "Draw me and I will run after you." (1:4). When God draws us, He draws with the life-giving, life-sustaining light of His love and truth. We then respond according to our created intent--we run after Him, stretch toward Him, and begin to tilt in His direction.
Our tilt toward God establishes and strengthens a foundation that can spiritually sustain and emotionally stabilize us. In that "tilt," we are closest to Him, and it is there we are most stable.
Footnote:
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Garry Wills, (New York: Penguin, 2006)
Well, that's what's been percolating in me lately!
Comments