December 18, 2019 – Acts 17:27

God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
—Acts 17:27

That there is much more near us than we understand or know, that we are every hour on the brink of doing things and being things that we never do or are gives life a restlessness and inspiration.77 We seem to ourselves, sometimes, like people who walk in the dark up and down a large, richly furnished house.
There comes in life to most people a sense of fumbling, a consciousness of this vague living in the dark. And out of it there come the universal characteristics of the human race—the unquenched hope, the sense that nothing is quite impossible, the self-pity and pathos with which people regard their own lives when they are thoughtful, the self-reproach that lies in wait just under the surface of our complacent vanity. All of these come from people vaguely knowing that they are always missing the things that they need most, things lying in the dark that they cannot see.
And suppose it were possible for a being with a sight that could see through the darkness to watch our fumbling. What would his feeling be about this humanity forever missing helps and chances it needed, often only by a finger’s breadth? How solemn his sight of us would be! He saw how hearts came and went in this world, always just touching on, just missing, the great comforting truths of a personal immortality, till Christ with his gospel brought it to light. He has seen how souls have gone through life burdened, distressed, perplexed, when the river flowed so close that it seemed as if they could not move without finding their hot and tired souls bathed in its rich waters—the faith they wanted, the Water of Life that their deaths were crying out for.
What must be the feeling of such a being about human life? Pity and awe. A blended sense of the vast endowment humanity has and, at the same time, of the terrible thing it is to miss so much. There is not merely pity for the sinner who can be so wicked, but reverence for the child of God who might be so good, blended into that perfect unity of saving love with which Jesus stoops to lift even the vilest and most insignificant of us out of our sin.
—Phillips Brooks