The One who wants me

I enter a great assembly hall. There is no darkness yet there is a greater light from the center. There are innumerable people stretching to the distance, to no end I can see. The aisle I am walking is clear of people, standing room only, not a space for me. I continue to walk forward, looking for a place where I can stand. There is none.

As I move my eyes are continually drawn to the central greater light. I can see a form there, but it's not clear. The light is intense; the more I look for clarity the more light I see. I need to avert my eyes, yet they are always drawn back to the same place. I don't know why I keep walking: perhaps it's that age old need to find a place yet finding none, knowing maybe there is something down front for me, perhaps where people are but thinking where I shouldn't be - I get that feeling here. I'm in a bit of a panic - no where to stand, overcommitted to the front, others watching me - thinking "I can't keep walking the aisle; I need a place to stand." But there's just no place.

I hear a voice. It seems from the center, from the light:

"Come closer."

I'm reluctant, feeling like I have been caught, now singled out in front of everyone. But I have no choice I'm guessing, so I move closer - conscious that everyone is watching.

"Come closer."

Now I'm really not sure what I'm supposed to do. I'm thinking that in dreams of past I always saw myself running to this place, as if I know the One so well that I wanted to meet Him. Here, however, it's different. I know who He is, yet I am being called to a place I have never been with Him.

As I draw near I see Him. Not a celestial being, not One so full of light that I cannot see. Just the One I have always known, the One I have sensed, the One I have felt, the One I have heard. The One that knows me. And He says what He has always said, most times unspoken, but felt when He is near:

"What would you like to know?"

I have always 'felt' this question - always thinking to have a long conversation, thinking a hundred possible questions, some deep and some just of curiosity. Just about things. But here, now, I'm thinking I should ask something I believe is important, that maybe I have only a moment of time before His attention moves elsewhere.

I hesitate, but He waits. There is no sound.

And all I can think of to say, of all of the things outside of me I could ask about, of all the things He is that I could inquire about, of all of the past and the future I could ask about, of all of the meanings I could seek of things experienced, hoped for, possibilities unimagined - I came up with this: "Why me?" And all the other questions that sprang up inside, but unspoken: Why was I sought, why did I respond, why did I maintain my hope, why did He answer, of so many others He might be speaking with why is His attention on me?

It is the great paradox of the Kingdom, and for me larger than all others: that He would want to know of me when few others would pay attention. That the Creator, the One whose gaze makes everything out of nothing, would move His attention to me. Now I'm thinking I've messed up the opportunity, that everyone present is thinking I have made this small conversation about me, that perhaps He should move on to others, other things, the greater possibilities that reshape the mind, change the universe; a great revelation, a sound, a vision.

Yet He still looks at me. I feel as if He cares about me beyond everyone's understanding.

He responds as I have always heard Him: with a question that expresses His heart, yet answers mine:

"Why would I not want to be with the one that wants Me?"

I will tell you a story of a man who entered a hall.

It was the greatest hall ever seen, longer than any building in the known world, filled from every wall to distant wall with the quiet press of people. And light — such light — pouring in from all directions, but gathered most intensely where He waited... brighter than any sun, more certain than any fire.

The man was late. There was no place for him.

Do not pass over this quickly — there was no place for him. Every space was taken, every person settled into their place as if they had always been there. No hand reached out. No shoulder turned. No voice whispered 'Here, brother, here is room'. There was only the long center aisle, empty as a country road in winter, leading straight toward the light he could barely stand to look upon.

And so he walked it. Not because he was brave, but because there was nowhere else to go.

He felt the weight of every eye in the great hall upon his back, and he wanted nothing more than to disappear into the crowd, to be one of the many, to be unremarkable and unseen. Somewhere in him — underneath the embarrassment and the fear, underneath the certainty that he was the one who didn't belong, walking toward the one place he had no right to reach — something kept moving his feet forward.

One step, then another, then another.

The voice came from the light. It was not loud. It did not need to be. Simply certain.

"Come closer."

He stopped. He was already too visible, already too exposed. To go further was to make a spectacle of whatever this was between them. He looked behind him at the hall full of souls. He was not special. He knew this about himself. He had always known it. And yet the voice came again, unchanged, unhurried:

"Come closer."

This is the miracle to carry with you always: he went.

Not with dancing. Not with the easy joy of the welcomed. He went the way a man walks into a difficult truth — slowly, without flourish, keeping the promise his feet had already made before his heart could catch up.

Here is the strange thing: the closer he came, the softer the light grew. What had seemed blinding from a distance became, up close, simply warm. And the One at the center of it was not the fearsome judge of his worst hours, of his guilty imaginings. No, it was the One he had known in the quiet. The One who had been there in the small rooms of his life, in the long nights, in the silences he thought went unheard.

The One who already knew his name. The One who already knew everything about him — and had come anyway.

And now He asked him — not in words so much, but in the way old friends would ask —

"What would you like to know?"

Consider this. Of all the hundred questions a man might carry to such a moment — the suffering of the innocent, the silence of heaven in dark years, the questions that would benefit all of mankind — what did this man ask?

He asked the small one. The selfish one. The embarrassing one he hadn't meant to say:

"Why me?"

He felt the foolishness of it immediately. The whole hall waiting, all that light — and he had made it about himself. He wanted to pull the words back the moment they left him. Surely now He would look past him, would move to greater concerns, would let him fade back into the undistinguished crowd where he belonged.

But the gaze did not move.

Did not look past him toward more deserving business. The gaze held, and in it was something the man only felt... as unreasonable care — the kind that doesn't calculate, doesn't keep records.

It was simply — there. Steady as stone. Warm as held hands.

And the answer came the way He had always answered him: not as a statement, but as a question that contained its own reply.

"Why would I not want to be with the one who wants Me?"

Write this on the walls of your heart. Write it and read it on the mornings when you are certain you do not belong, when the hall seems full and there is no room, and the aisle stretches before you like an accusation.

The wanting is enough.

The wanting has always been enough.

The man stood there a long time. Around him the hall went on being full of people. The light went on being light. But he understood, finally, that the aisle had not been empty because no one made room.

It had been left open for him.