ALONG THE WAY · CONTEMPLATIVE INHABITATION
Abide
On attention, attachment, and the life that remains in the Vine.
There is a peculiar impossibility hidden inside the command to abide.
At least, it seems impossible at first.
“Abide in Me.”
Very well. But there is laundry to fold.
There are children to raise and meals to cook and invoices to send. Floors will become unspeakable if no one sweeps them, appointments will not attend themselves, and our bodies, inconveniently enough, require food and sleep. Surely Christ did not mean that devotion requires abandoning everything He has entrusted to us in order to spend every waking hour consciously thinking about Him.
Perhaps the difficulty is that we have confused attention with attachment.
I think of my son.
There are hours when I am not looking at him at all. He goes to school while I work. He plays in another room while I accomplish something in the kitchen. I take a shower while listening through the wall for that particular change in sound every mother seems to recognize. At night I sleep, but there is a monitor nearby, and somehow even in sleep a part of me remains listening.
None of this means that he can live indefinitely on the fact that I am somewhere in the house.
A child needs more than proximity. He needs my face turned toward his. He needs conversation, affection, laughter, correction, comfort, meals together, questions answered, and those stretches of time in which he knows he is not merely one concern among many. Love requires intentional attention.
But the strange thing is that those moments create something which continues after them.
They create attunement.
I can be occupied with something entirely unrelated to my son and still recognize his voice above every other sound in the room.
I wonder whether abiding is something like this.
There must be time deliberately given to God, not because He requires a religious quota from us, but because relationships do not deepen accidentally. There must be prayer and Scripture and worship and those quiet places where nothing particularly productive appears to be happening except that a creature is learning the voice of his Creator.
Eventually, however, we must get up.
The dishes are still there.
And getting up does not mean leaving Him.
Perhaps maturity is learning to carry that communion into the kitchen, into our work, into parenthood and decisions and conversations. We begin to live with an inward attentiveness to God, not anxiously checking every five minutes to make certain He has not disappeared, but increasingly accustomed to His presence and increasingly interruptible by His voice.
The branch, after all, does not spend its life staring at the vine.
It simply never attempts to become its own source.
This may be why abiding is considerably more demanding than occasional devotion. Devotion can be scheduled. We may give God thirty minutes in the morning and then, without ever saying so aloud, resume sovereignty over the remaining twenty-three and a half hours.
Abiding allows no such arrangement.
The branch has no independent life to return to.
Perhaps this is also why deliverance is often more attractive to us than formation. We are usually quite willing for God to rescue us from Egypt. Egypt hurts. Bondage is unpleasant, and when the sea opens there is little argument about whether we ought to run through it.
The difficulty begins on the other side.
God had brought Israel out of Egypt, but Egypt had also made its home in Israel. One could be escaped in a night; the other would take a wilderness.
This seems to be one of the recurring surprises of life with God. We ask Him to free us from the thing that has wounded or enslaved us, and then discover that His intention was larger than relief. He means to make us into people who know how to live free.
Israel repeatedly looked backward because slavery, for all its cruelty, was familiar. Hunger in Egypt could somehow seem preferable to dependence in the wilderness. Yesterday’s miracle faded remarkably quickly when today’s water ran short.
I suspect we are not terribly different.
We want the Lord to remove what is destroying us, but we become less enthusiastic when He begins touching the habits, fears, loyalties, appetites, and assumptions that grew around it. We want to be rescued from something without always understanding that we have been rescued to Someone.
And that is where abiding becomes costly.
The branch must surrender the illusion that it possesses life in itself.
Yet this is not the loss of personhood we sometimes fear. A branch joined to the vine does not become less alive. It becomes capable of bearing what it could never produce alone.
Earlier this year, the Lord gave me a picture of a bicycle race. I was riding behind the Holy Spirit, and the instruction was simple: stay in His tailwind.
I loved the picture because I was still pedaling.
There was effort involved. I was not being carried down the road while doing nothing. I still had to ride, pay attention, endure the hills, and keep moving. But I was doing all of it within the advantage of following Someone ahead of me.
I was also free to leave His wake. Nothing prevented me from drifting to either side. But once I did, I met resistance that had been unnecessary before. I could still move forward, only now I was spending more strength to do it.
There is something in that picture that has stayed with me.
We sometimes imagine surrender to God as though He means to take over our lives in such a way that we cease to participate in them. Yet Scripture seems to offer something much more interesting. We work, choose, build, love, parent, risk, rest, and obey, but we learn to do these things in response to Another rather than independently of Him.
We are still pedaling.
We have simply stopped insisting on choosing the wind.
Perhaps that is why Jesus did not say, “Visit Me.”
He said, “Abide.”
Make your home here.
And from that home, go live the life I have given you.
There is no contradiction between abiding in Christ and answering an email, washing a dish, raising a child, building a business, or taking a shower while listening for small feet in the next room. The question is not whether our conscious attention can remain fixed upon God every second. It cannot, and I do not think He asks it to.
The deeper question is whether, beneath all the ordinary movement of our lives, we remain available to Him.
Have I lived closely enough with Him to recognize His voice when it comes? Am I willing to be interrupted, corrected, comforted, or redirected? When the road bends somewhere I had not planned to go, will I remain behind Him, or decide that my route seems safer?
This is perhaps the difference between merely having been delivered and learning to abide.
One gets us out of Egypt.
The other teaches us how to live with God once we are free.
And maybe that is what Jesus meant by remaining in the vine. Not the impossible strain of thinking about Him every second, but the settled dependence of a life that no longer wishes to exist separately from Him.
To pray, certainly.
To sit at His feet, often and for long enough that His voice becomes familiar.
But then to get up, because there is work to do.
And to discover that He gets up with us.
