I didn’t want to do it. I couldn’t deny that Laura’s idea was a good one, but I just didn’t want to bother the neighbor. We found an iron rod with a small diameter in our basement, bequeathed to us with love by the former owner. It would do if we could get it cut to the right length and welded back together in the right shape. Our neighbor, you may remember, is a metal worker. He could do the job in a few minutes, but I hated the idea of knocking on his door, him opening up, and internally is heart dropping, thinking, Oh, it’s Eric again. I wonder what he wants this time.
I’m sure that says more about me than my neighbor.
In the end, however, I took the plunge. He welcomed me in with a smile. We walked to the back of his property where his shop is set up. I told him how long we wanted the pieces cut and how we wanted it welded back together.
“Easy,” he said and went to work. And in a few minutes we had our pieces.
The pieces worked perfectly. It seems that when they built the cinderblock wall that divides our property from the neighbors’, they laid one row of cinderblocks, slathered mortar on top, and then, two per cinderblock, placed small cylindrical rods horizontally across the cinderblocks, right into the mortar. Then they laid the next level of cinderblocks. Again, they covered that layer with more mortal and laid two cylindrical rods horizontally across each block. By doing this, it seems like each previous layer was able to support the weight of the next layer without it squishing out all the mortar from between the layers. The rods held up the weight of the wall until the mortar dried, and then they were all removed.
The upshot for us? Our cinderblock wall has perfectly shaped and rather evenly spaced round holes running through each layer of mortar. And why is that significant? We had a place to hang one side of our hammock (the walnut tree in our backyard would support the other side)—if, that is, we could fashion something that could slide right into the those holes that we could then attach to the hammock.
In the end, the whole thing went off without a hitch. In fact, I’m stretched out in said hammock right now typing away beneath a warm morning sun.
It’s quiet. Several different species of birds are singing and chirping away. A concert of bees, directed by that force known only to their kind, hums as they do their work among the cherry blossoms of the tree in our other neighbor’s yard. The sun, despite the fact that it’s all of 93 million miles away, reaches across all that space (it’s light takes something like seven whole minutes to reach us, mind you), and warms my hands as they rest on the keyboard of my laptop. There are footsteps and occasional voices from behind the cinderblock wall my hammock is attached to. We’re all quarantined together. The dogs at times bark their heads off at someone walking by our front gate or at one of the several dogs who regularly patrol our area that must have gotten a little too close to our dogs’ turf. Clings and clangs from our metal worker neighbor waft up and over the fence between our house and his.
But it’s the light and warmth from the sun that my mind keeps coming back to. Ninety-three million miles is a lot of miles. Yet not a single mile stops the insistence of the sun. How can I connect personally—literally feel—something that is so far off? My brain isn’t really able to make sense of it. Yet there it is blazing in all of its glory, and here I am typing away on this keyboard, and there’s the sun’s light on the back of my hands and the sun’s heat warming my skin.
It strikes me as I lie here in this hammock that if an inanimate object like a burning ball of gas is able to reach out across time and space and from an unfathomably long distance reach down and literally touch me on the back of the hand, should I be so skeptical as to whether God himself is able to do the exact same thing?
I don’t know where God actually exists. He brought everything else that is into being, so he must be outside time and space. People much smarter than me say that it’s a whole 46 billion lightyears from one side of the universe to the other. Whatever that means. I guess it’s a really long way. So even if God exists somewhere outside of all that, and even if, relative to me, he’s billions of lightyears distant, would it be strange at all to think that his light and heat—you might call it his Spirit—is capable of reaching out across all that time and space that separates us and can literally touch the back of my hand or the top of my hand or rest across my shoulders? And when I feel him, is it unreasonable to think that it’s really him, even if he’s so far away?
I don’t think so. The sun can do it. Why couldn’t God?
I had a conversation with a good friend recently, and we were talking about the fact that a person doesn’t really need to ask God to draw close. God already is close. What we need is eyes to seem him. We need a new awareness that he’s there—that he’s always there. Truly, “he is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27).
Stretched out in this hammock in the backyard, with literally nowhere to go, in the still humdrum of daily life happening around me, I’m finally in a position to quiet my flighty mind and begin to perceive his presence. I’m so glad Laura convinced me to ask my neighbor to cut and weld that metal rod. It took some thinking, some planning, and some work to carve out a space in which I could be quiet enough to reorient myself to the God who is there. I had to risk bothering my neighbor to make it possible. It might take some time and effort for you to create a space for yourself to do the same, too. But it’s worth it. We’re cut off from so many of our loved ones during this time of quarantines and shelter-in-place orders. But God is as close to us as the light and heat of the sun across the back of our hands. And his presence is just as bright and warm and soothing. If we would intentionally become aware of it.