The God Who Goes With Us

On pillars, wilderness, and the years you think you lost

A certain kind of sorrow arises when looking back. You go through the years and find that some of them don’t seem to have been truly lived in; they just seem to have been used up and are now gone. You then think about the places you were at that time, and if you are honest with yourself, you start to wonder about God as well.

We all have some form of that question. If you’re the type who plans every aspect of your life or the type who tends to keep going, at some point you look up and find that you’ve ended up on the wrong path. The route you’re on now isn’t the one you intended. And the fear that still lies underneath it all is this: have I wasted it? And was I all by myself the entire time?

It is useful to recall a few things regarding the God we are actually dealing with before coming to that question, since it is the real one.

A God who goes with you

When God rescued a whole nation of people who had been enslaved and led them out into the open wilderness, He did not send them a map and then wish them well; instead, He went with them in a visible way, placing a pillar of cloud before them during the day along with a pillar of fire before them at night, so that no matter whether the sun was shining or it had grown dark they could look up and see that He was still there.

Consider what that implies. Instead of remaining in the safe place and giving them instructions from there, God placed a part of His presence right in the middle of their journey, a steady point in a changing environment, close enough to see. The Bible even includes a brief, almost neglected remark about this: the pillar never moved from its position in front of them, not at any time, either on their better days or on their worst.

This is the kind of God there is, not a god who stays at a distance, but one who goes with his people into difficult places, into areas where the path is not obvious and where they might become lost.

We are the ones who drift.

The truthful part is this: the people that He led in that way continued to wander about. They complained and got panicky. While the God who had delivered them was still right in front of them, shining in the darkness, they made a golden image, and their attention continued to drift.

So do ours. It’s generally not dramatic. We never deliberately decide to look away; we become distracted by the next thing, the noisy thing, the urgent thing, and gradually we cease looking up. The pillar is still there, but we no longer check it.

That’s something important to keep in mind; in the account of you and God, you are nearly always the one who takes the initiative, while He tends to remain precisely where He said He would.

He came even closer

Then He did something that the pillar never did; you can follow a pillar of cloud and see a pillar of fire across a desert, but you can’t sit down beside it, can’t have a conversation with it, and can’t be known by it.

He thus eliminated that gap. He came among us in human form, subject to hunger and tiredness, having skin and a name. He got close so that He could be touched, close enough to weep, close enough that those who knew Him referred to Him by a term which means God with us. The One who had previously led the people from a pillar in front of them now walked right in the middle of the crowd, in a body just like yours.

If the pillar told the wanderers, ‘I will go with you,’ the Incarnation would say, ‘I will become one of you,’ and that would be the closest that God can be.

Now, the hard question

Which brings us back to the years you think you lost.

You want to know how to tell the difference: were those years when God was quietly with you, or were they just the wreckage of your own bad choices?

I would like to address the question subtly, since it implies that the two cases are distinct; in fact, they usually aren’t.

Return to those original inhabitants of the wilderness. What prompted them to spend forty years there in the first place? It was due to a poor decision, a genuine one. Although they had the opportunity to enter upon all that had been promised to them, they were afraid, refused to do so, and lacked trust in the God who had already brought them so far. The wandering was the result. In the most literal sense, those years were lost due to their own failure.

God was with each and every one of them.

He supplied them with food in the wilderness and water from a rock. Their clothing did not wear out at all. The pillar remained, and it was because of their bad decision that they were there, yet it was by grace that they had been kept through it. Both of these things were true at the same time.

Here’s something to keep in mind: the fact that you made bad choices does not prove that God is not there. Moreover, the fact that certain doors closed as a result of your actions doesn’t mean that God has suddenly changed His position. You don’t have to choose between the two stories; the more accurate one is almost always that you wandered and yet were not left alone in your wandering.

How to actually tell

If you are looking for a way to look back that is more helpful than assigning blame, then don’t divide your years into ‘good’ and ‘wasted’ ones; instead, look for the fingerprints.

Consider all that those years have given you, the knowledge you now have of yourself, of other people, of God, knowledge which it was only possible to acquire through those experiences. Consider how you have been looked after. The provision that came to you. The person who turned up at the right time. The fact that you are still standing, still here, still able to ask this question. That is not the sort of thing that could be the resume of a person who was on their own.

The wilderness wasn’t merely a form of punishment; it was there that a whole people discovered who their God was and realized that they could rely on Him, lessons which could not have been gained in a comfortable situation. Although you might have been the ones to bring about your wilderness experiences, it is still possible that they were the very thing which was shaping you.

The last word on wasted years

In an old book of the Bible, there stands a promise in which God addresses a weary and repentant people, saying that He will restore to them the years that the locusts had eaten. He will not erase them or treat them as if they had never occurred; instead, He will restore them, giving them back together with interest, so that even the years that had been eaten will be of some value.

That in fact is the entire point. There is a story well known to Jesus about a young man who took his inheritance, walked out of the house, and squandered it all with nothing to fall back on, the most clear-cut example of years wasted that could possibly be given. And when he at last turned around and began the long journey back, ashamed and going over in his mind what apology to make, his father did not meet him with a list of accounts. Instead, he ran out to meet him.

Therefore, if you are in the middle of your life and have been calculating the extent of your losses, listen to this: you may have strayed, and some of that straying could very well have been your own fault. That is possible. But you have never been beyond the reach of God, the God who established a pillar in the desert, who came among people in human form so as to be near you, and who moves towards people when they are on their way back.

You were together during those years, and He has not yet finished counting them.