In the quiet place
In the stillness
You are there
In the secret
In the quiet hour I wait
Because I want to know you more
I want to know you
I want to hear your voice
I want to know you more
I want to touch you
I want to see your face
I want to know you more
I am reaching for the highest goal
That I might receive the prize
Pressing onward
Pushing every hindrance aside
Out of my way
Cause I want to know you more
This is a famous praise song. We sing it as impassioned believers longing to see the face of our great God--the very face that caused Isaiah to cry out, "Woe to me! I am ruined!" For God sees us as we truly are, and to see God is to see that truth, the truth of our utter wretchedness and filth. But the degree to which we are unclean does not even compare with the degree to which God is holy and glorious, our very light and life. So we do long to see His face, for we are able to stand before Him in confidence if we are covered by Christ's atoning blood--praise Him!
...But that lovely thought is not even what I really want to say here today. What I really want to say is that this song is a song of simplicity; it demonstrates the beauty of waiting and the difficult work that goes with it: pressing on while being still. Moreover, not even merely "pressing on," but pressing on with abandon! We rid ourselves of every (even minor) hindrance, all for the purpose of maintaining stillness before a very big and slumberless God.
Lord, still my spirit to soak in Your presence, to learn Your holiness...
Writing this alone in the middle of the night--this is my "quiet hour." The tick of the clock and the refrigerator's hum are the heartbeat and rush of blood in this womb of mine. This is where I thrive.
And I now return to what engendered this post in the first place:
I've lately been thinking on wombs. Is there any other place so secret? We may well say that God does His best miracles there--so small a bundle of cells inside, carrying all the metaphors of the world upon its not-yet-literal shoulders.
In the secret, in the quiet place, in the stillness, You are there...
God creates in the womb a tiny life that needs to be known--needs quite desperately to be heard, touched, seen. A baby that needs his mommy and daddy. Oh, what a helplessness to develop! Yet develop it does, and in God's time, the baby is known by her mommy and daddy, all the while known by her creator, whether she comes to know that or not.
**
Sometimes it helps to think of God as the one waiting. He is singing softly, "In the secret, in the quiet hour I wait, because I want to know you more." (This is not an entirely accurate description, but as I said, sometimes it helps to think this way a bit.) At some point in the beginning, God did want intimacy with His creation but the Fall barred that option.
He created a system of sacrifice--nope, still too far away.
He sent Jesus, the God-man--"pushed every hindrance aside" to make a way for man to be reunited with Him.
But even after God came close enough to man for us to hear, touch, and see Him in the person of the Christ, God didn't stop there; He then sent His Spirit that delves even deeper than the physical senses. The Spirit helps us in our weakness (Rom. 8) and intercedes for us in accordance with God's will. God the Spirit is the umbilical cord that connects us to God the Father, nurturing and sustaining us all the while.
I am ever more thankful for that Spirit. He is peace. We recently lost a baby, three or four weeks along. Yet out of nothing that is from me, I am filled with peace, with hope and faith and love. T.S. Eliot says it best:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Praise be to the God from whom no secret is kept. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account, and when the Spirit testifies for us--there is light, there is dancing.
So I am still waiting; and waiting, still. In that stillness, there is dancing.
Oh, the dancing!
