God’s Transcendence and Immanence
Some of my favorite childhood memories smell like campfire smoke and frying biscuit dough. My family spent our summers occupying Horseshoe Bend on Beaver Lake. We're a big crew: me, my brothers, my parents, my mom's three brothers and their wives, and their friends. A central campsite became our gathering place. That's where Grandpa set up his stove and made scrambled eggs and bacon -where Grandma fried up biscuit dough - where the fire crackled late into the night as stories and laughter rang out.
One night, my parents and brothers left to go home. Our camping crew dwindled as others cut out for the work week. But I got to stay. There wasn't boisterous laughter or raucous games. We didn't keep an immense fire. We lay in a hammock. We looked up at the stars. Grandma started to sing to me.
"Down in the valley, valley so low, lean your head over, hear the wind blow. Hear the wind blow dear . . ."
I looked up at the endless sky and realized how small I was. It's a strange feeling - to realize how small you are in the universe and know, without a doubt, that you are deeply loved.
For months, a question had been brewing in my mind. Grandma Charlotte (my great-great-grandma) passed away earlier that year. I was in the third grade. My mom shared the news with me while I sat on my bed. She explained, "When someone dies, they never come back." I understood what she told me the best I could. The idea of death didn't make me sad or scared. It baffled me that something could be so final.
I attentively attended the funeral; I wanted to see how people behaved with something so irreversible. I wore a black silk clip-on tie. People were laughing as they told stories. I asked Grandma Vickie to take me with her to the front. I watched my grandma kiss her Grandma Charlotte's forehead and whisper, "Goodnight, Grandma."
Not goodbye. Just goodnight.
That night in the hammock, under the stars, with a sense of smallness and safety, I finally asked the question: "Why aren't you sad about Grandma Charlotte?"
I felt her chest jolt as she sucked in a sharp breath, the kind that snatches the air like a gasp before fear takes hold. She held me and helped me understand - as much as possible. She kept singing. Grandma's voice blended with the night air, and I let myself sink into the questions I couldn't voice.
As we swayed together in the hammock under the clear spring sky, those stars in the sky became something beyond decorations. A presence stretched beyond the campground, beyond the visible sky, beyond the ether of time itself, into the very fabric of existence.
As much as a third grader can, I felt two things at once: a sense of God's transcendence, His vastness, His mystery, His being beyond me, and a sense of God's immanence, His closeness, His personal and relational love.
The same God who spoke the stars into existence whispered in the quiet night through the warm breeze across the lake, actively revealing His majesty while comforting me with the knowledge that I was seen, known, and held by Him.
Years later, I found words for what I experienced that night. I read Paul's inspired explanation in Acts 17:24-27 that "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us."
God is both infinitely beyond us and intimately near.
That night, I didn't have the words for it, that life, love, and eternity stretched further than I could understand. God, who crafted each star, was near enough to hold me in the hammock, humming with me through the night.
Maybe you've had a moment like that - when you felt small in the vastness of life. A moment when you brushed up against eternity and felt drawn to seek Him.
You can know God for yourself. He invites you to walk with Him. Will you respond to His call or turn away?
