Questions of God: Where are you? No, really, where are you?

They say that the most intense sport of all is wrestling. It requires tenacity, strength, and cunning. We use wrestling as analogies all the time. We may be wrestling with a co-worker about how to solve a certain problem. Or I may be wrestling with a new concept, trying to understand it. There was even a guy who wrestled with God (or was it an angel?) in the Bible, Jacob. This is most likely where this whole wrestling analogy comes from. 

A child plays at wrestling with his daddy, and dad even lets him “win” once in a while, before things get silly, and tickling ensues. All for fun and laughs, but underlying all this is a lesson about life, that things require perseverance and struggle, and that those times of wrestling can end in joy. 

When God asks us this question, “Where are you?” He may not be looking for information, right? He’s not trying to figure out where I am, He’s trying to help me know where I am. Where I am can depend on a lot of factors.

I may be wrestling with things in my mind, in my thinking. I may be asking questions about the nature of things as they are, or as I perceive them. Perception itself could be the thing on the table. I could be seriously studying for a class in college and bump up against a fact or conclusion that would lead to a moment of clarity or curiosity beyond the mere subject at hand.

Years ago I had a moment like that. I was in a practice room working on a piece of music for an arranging class, when I became very interested in dissonance and consonance. I had the light off in the room and I was playing chords on the piano and observing how they affected me. Why did some chords create tension and others resolve it? Why does music exist at all? Why isn’t this just a bunch of random noise? Then the thought occurred to me, perhaps music is supposed to exist. Maybe these seemingly random facts of harmony, addition and superposition of waves, and all the other thousands of bits of physics that happen when people lift up their voices together, or when the band starts to jam, were put there for us to discover? At that moment I discovered transcendence. I knew then that there was more to life than mere facts and skill and physics. My mind was reeling, and I was wrestling.

So as I began to deeply study music, I heard a higher octave, a Voice from somewhere, but just faintly. “Where are you?”