GLIMPSES, 2/8/2000
Listening to other people’s spiritual concerns can sometimes lead to a new glimpse of truth.
Several Sundays ago in a discussion at church, a man brought up the difficulty of clinging to faith in a harsh world. His dilemma made me think of a children’s book I had read years before, in which a child is given a ball of invisible thread with the promise that it will lead her home through any kind of trouble. (George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin) It was a good image for the relationship between God and the human soul. I thought—God’s sure promise at one end of the thread, and the soul’s sure faith at the other—and I shared the image with the group without thinking much more of it.
After the discussion was over, the image wouldn’t let me go. It kept multiplying until I could see clearly that every creature on earth must be holding on to a separate thread, and every relationship with God is therefore a unique and individual journey. From this expanded image I began to see that in spite of our separateness, we are not isolated. Each of us has the potential of supplying encouragement and love to others (even over great distances)—the kind of love Christ came to demonstrate, and which, it turns out, is an important part of the journey itself.
To put the invisible thread image to the test I applied it to a man in the discussion group who had voiced an honest fear that his relationship with God might not hold. He spoke for all of us, I realized. We can remind ourselves that for thousands of years our community of faith has been demonstrating and confirming that our relationships with God, though invisible, are not frail at all, but stronger than steel.
This seems a good image to hold onto in the new century.
Charlotte Gibson
Charlotte Gibson has served as spiritual growth coordinator at Christ Church for several years. She occasionally writes on spirituality.
