Do you ever feel as if God is distant?  Or not there at all?  You're not the only one.  The poet Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer who died in the last century, penned some profoundly constructed words in this regard.  In her "Rowing Toward God," she writes of how she is constantly rowing toward God yet how this rowing is an "awful" rowing that never seems to reach him.

    And even when she thinks that she has reached God, she finds that he is not as friendly or welcoming as she thought he might be.  Moreover, she realizes that, in the end, God holds all the cards ("five aces," as she puts it).  Her ultimate destiny is completely in his hands.

    So Sexton's is an awful rowing, an awful rowing toward a destination which, to her, deeply disappoints, a destination that, to her, is devoid of hope.  Who really am I? she wonders.  If God makes the final call, what is the point?

    Indeed.  Apart from visible exchange with God, we might all wonder the same thing.  In a world which we did not make, a world in which God seems distant, even  nonexistent, and yet holds all the cards, who and why are we?  Is there a reason beyond the moment?

    Only if, as the apostle John wrote, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Only if God has made himself known.

    The good news is that, in the person of Jesus Christ, he has.