Pickled Presence

It's 7:00 am on a Friday, and I roll out of bed cold, stiff, and reluctant to put on my running shoes. The windows are hazy from the leftover rain from last night's rainstorm. The sky is equally resistant to the day, refusing to let sunlight lift the quilted covers of cloudy sheets that bed the earth below. The humidity is visible, like fog hovering softly above a warm lake on a cool morning.

My morning runs are both miserable and tranquil. Miserable because my legs are still tight with stress from the day before, and tranquil because this is when my mind is equally stretched out - no longer bedbound, free to wander, exploring God and the creation he placed me within. "When I run, I feel God's pleasure."1 I encounter God when I run. This is probably because I'm no longer in front of a screen; God is in front of me, and I am chasing him in no particular direction.

As the sound of my feet pounding on pavement harmonizes with the sound of crows and crashing waves, little dots of green scatter the shoulder of the road I run on. I live down the road from a pickle factory. Because of this, it is not uncommon for the shoulder of our road to have occasional baby cucumbers that have fallen on their journey from the field to the factory.

Hold on to that cucumber for a minute.

Somewhere after mile one, I began to think about the presence of God, and its usefulness to us. The presence of God is God's attendance; it is His abode, where He lives, moving into where we live our days. The mistake I, and so many other Christians before and after me, have made is to think of the presence of God as being something that is for our own interests. I'm not saying that the presence of God is opposed to us, but that the presence of God was there before we ever were. In other words, the presence of God was not made for our sake, but we were made for the sake of the presence of God.

Stick with me. Don't get lost in the brine.

When God created Adam and Eve, he created them for His own good pleasure. They didn't waltz into God's presence with their own requests in mind; instead, God placed them within His presence and gave them purpose. Shortly before God created Eve, He gave humanity their ultimate purpose and what they (we) are here for. Genesis says, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." (Gen. 2:15 ESV) That phrase "to work it and keep it" is Temple language. It is the language of presence and care. The Hebrew words are "leʿoḇḏāh ûlešomrāh". Everywhere in the Old Testament that you see this phrase, you see an expression of the need to tend to the Temple and the Presence of God within it.


Was God making gardeners, or was He making gardens of priests?

We weren't made for ourselves; we were made for the Presence of God.

Paul said it this way: "Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." (1 Cor. 6:19-20 ESV)

Does the Presence of God that I enjoy so deeply belong to me? Or was I made to belong to it? Or, put another way, was I made for something more than receiving? Something closer to the transformation of becoming something for something other than myself.

There I ran, stepping over cucumbers that never became pickles. Spoiled glory. Intent that has long been lost. It's funny to me that pickles are cucumbers we've renamed entirely. Pickles are just cucumbers that have undergone a transformative process into the thing for which they were created. And so I began to ask myself on my run, "Am I a pickle or a cucumber? (Yes, that's what I asked myself, God, and the squirrels in the trees.) Does the presence of God belong to me, or do I belong to it? Does God exist for me, or do I exist for Him?"

We are all like cucumbers that must be immersed - drenched and bottled up for the one who delights in us. Tending to the Temple is the brine of glory. It is salt on our lips that makes us thirst for eternal companionship with the one who made us for Himself. I was made for Presence because God created me to be a gardener priest who tends to glory. I desire Presence only because Presence created me for it, and not the other way around. We belong to God, and God to us, because God made us for His glory.

All too often I see Christians attending church services approaching God as if God were created for them and not the other way around. As if the cucumber gets to tell the farmer what its bidding is. We were placed in this little corner of the earth to glory in another. Forgetting our purpose, we have made the glory of God to be the lesser glory of man. Cucumbers trying to avoid the Brine of Presence and yet demanding the transformation benefits without the process of being fully taken by God. We search for where beauty comes from, only to find out beauty does not belong to us, but we belong to beauty.

This is where my mind runs to when I'm running.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Augustine wrote so beautifully.2

Today, I want to encourage you to tend to the Presence of God, to glorify God, to immerse yourself in the brine of grandeur, for God's sake alone. The triumph of transformation is found in this bottled-up Eden exhalation we call the Christian life. Giving ourselves back to the one who gave us the beauty we all search for.

Notes:

(1) Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson (Warner Bros., 1981).

(2) Augustinus, Aurelius. Confessions. Repr. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Engl: Penguin Books, 1982.