By Keith Miller

Today I came out of a “Tunnel” into a world that seems bright and filled with hope. I had been having the “blahs” again and had been stumbling through my days with a kind of grey feeling. And this-morning I wanted to shout at God, “Where did You go? Where are You?” And then I laughed at my own childishness and thought what a thankless job God has taken on – to love us when so often we are not even conscious of Him.

This started me thinking about the idea that God loves us as a “Father”. And I wondered why He does. What would this kind of love be like from His perspective? A scene flashed onto the wall of my memory.

It was the middle of a winter’s night some years back, shortly after I had seriously tried to give God the keys to my future. One of our children had called out in the darkness, “Daaady!” I was surprised, since they usually called their mother. But I got up, stumbled into her room and carried her into the bathroom. The only light was a soft red glow shining on her face from the clay mantles in the gas wall heater. I sat her up on the little pottie seat and bent over to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. Her head lolled gently to one side and then she would catch herself, but never quite awaken.

As I stood there looking at the softness of her face with her eyes closed, and the slightly tousled long blond hair, I was filled with the most amazing sense of love and gratitude for that little girl. I kissed her gently on the nose and thought, “Some day you and I will remember this as a time of great closeness”. And I could picture us talking about that night when she was a grown girl.

But then I realized that she would never remember this midnight closeness – because she’d been asleep the whole time I was holding her. But even though she was asleep and would not remember these moments, my own love for her had in some way filled and changed my life as I had quietly helped her through a long winter night.

As I tucked her into bed with a kiss, it struck me that in some sense this might be one of the reasons the whole Christian venture is worth it to God, in the light of our amazing lack of awareness of His presence. I saw that He had been with me all along, loving me and helping me in the most mundane ways, even during those long nights of doubt when I have been spiritually asleep, oblivious to His presence. But even then, when I might least have been trying to respond to Him, His love for me may have in some way have warmed His life…..as my love for my little girl did mine.