With a single smile, she bisected time.

There was a period before I knew her. There was a period when I knew about her. Then she smiled an eternal instant in which, though I knew few facts about her, I knew her. With a smile, she birthed in me a life in which I can never be except to be with her. Many of the peaks and valleys of my past seem charged with meaning that our marriage now illuminates. As I imagine the future, the hope of finding and tasting peace and joy in whatever comes, her hand in mine, charges the present, propelling me forward each morning. She smiled, my heart sang in response, and now my past, present, and future cohere in the light of this diverse unity God created.

I share this love story with you because it illuminates a long stretch of my journey in which I searched for God but did not find God. I offer it as an analogy that illumines an even greater love in my life. Guessing that others may be wandering as I did, I thought I'd  share my story.

My Wilderness Wandering

Wilderness wandering is a blessing because it means you've been delivered from whatever idol captured you and are being prepared for the good that awaits you. My wilderness wandering began when my late wife snuck two things into my seabag just before I deployed for six months. The first was the Bible my grandmother gave me for confirmation. The second was a cassette tape by a young singer named Amy Grant.

After watch one day I felt emotionally adrift and read the Bible with curiosity and hope for comfort. I read it from cover to cover by the time we returned to port. It made no sense to me.

But an Amy Grant song captivated me. I listened to it repeatedly before I fell asleep. "Sing Your Praise to the Lord." I longed to experience the joy and confidence in God that resounded in her song and touched something deep within me.

I began to search. Mentors showed up. They most often quoted Romans 10:9 ("…if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord…, you will be saved."). That was supposed to shorten my search, but it just confused me. It wasn't self-evident to me why or from what threat I need deliverance, why Jesus could or would save me, and, most of all, why my escape hatch from calamity consists of a simple declarative sentence.

I searched, but I did not find. I spent years devouring Scripture and showing up in Church, striving to figure out how this faith thing worked so I could master it. I tried to reason my Way to God. It didn't work.

A Second Way of Knowing

I often confess to friends that the Lord made me take remedial laps around the wilderness perimeter before letting me peek into the Promised Land. In retrospect, I needed remediation because I didn't get the art of learning. All of us are children of the Enlightenment, but my immersion in the nuclear Navy magnified in me a common false conviction.

The Navy inculcated in me a rich conception of the empirical. My emotions suppressed, my head immersed in charts and graphs, and my eyes glued to metrics, I learned to trust the phenomenal, which appears to ordinary human perception and reason. Though we are vulnerable to a probabilistic error in our apprehension of all phenomena, they reliably refer to the reality of the objects we encounter. In science, I trust. We know because we comprehend cause and effect empirically; that is, we know scientifically through inductive identification of material and efficient causes. Such knowledge is communicable across generations and disciplines and can be tested scientifically. I left the Navy with a firm but false conviction that the way we learn is to dissect a thing to understand its construction and cause.

The wise say no to the arrogance of the inapt definite article. I was a fool who could not imagine there is a second way of knowing. The scientific method is a way, not the only way we learn.

What we call the scientific method is not the only manner of our knowing. We also know things and ideas that are manifest to us - through the experience of their manifest image. There is an important distinction between having sufficient comprehension of the construction and cause of a thing and having justification for making claims about it. If we encounter a president's statue, we are justified in our claim that it is a president's statue even if we can't identify its material or its sculptor.

My significant error was in trying to put God under a microscope, in trying to dissect the object of faith whose lordship I must confess. I assumed that the only way I could make justifiable claims about God was if I comprehended the sculpture's material and artist. So I studied God as an object, an impersonal abstraction, which is why I sought and did not find God. We, finite creatures, experience God only as a subject, as One who acts upon us always as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God manifests as three Persons carrying on towards fulfilling the divine dream for the created order.

Here's what I missed all those years in the wilderness: Recognizing that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are Persons is critical to the knowledge of them, for we don't come to know persons primarily through the scientific method. We know persons not with microscopes but by participating in their lives.

A human is a neuro-physiological system we can study under a microscope, but a person is more than this. A person can feel, experience emotions, think, and act, and the patterns in which these capacities actuate constitute dispositions. A person's character is manifest as dispositions.⁠ Dispositions form the nature of a person, but they reveal their nature through iterative acts. To know the nature of a person requires being present during the successive acts through which they demonstrate their dispositions. That is, one's character manifests through iterative encounters with one's thoughts, words, and actions. Paying attention to those things is how we know another's character.

Eventually I learned what many folks  intuit much more quickly than I: That a personal relationship arises when two persons direct attention to each other to reveal their natures reciprocally. Such ongoing sociality requires an initiating instance of attention-getting and then a series of reciprocating acts of address and response that mutually demonstrate each person's dispositions. More simply: a shared sociality of address and response constitutes a personal relationship. I could have a personal relationship with our risen Lord by addressing and listening to him, and taking note of his steadfast presence as I journeyed through the peaks and valleys of life. I didn't need a microscope. I needed celestial AirPods!

What a revelation that was for me! For at last I understood what it means to have a personal relationship with Christ. Who knew that I already had one! I never noticed the Road to Damscus instance of attention-getting and conversion for which I searched, but perhaps that moment was that gentle pressure I felt those nights I felt warmed by Amy Grant's song of praise. Jesus and I had that shared history. It was just one of those relationships where he did all the talking and listening, while I mutely searched for him while tuned to the wrong frequency.

The Art of Learning

In my love story above, there was a time when I merely knew information about my wife. There was no substantive personal relationship. But then, to my surprise, there was a blessed initiating instance in which we got each other's attention. Wow, did she get my attention! Our shared history of addressing and responding to each other, of revealing our character iteratively to each other, began. She is now my strength in need, my counselor in perplexity, my comfort in sorrow, and my companion in joy.

I beheld the art of learning along the Way of Love when I recognized that I could not reason my Way to Jesus and didn't need to. For Jesus was already there, had always been there, walking alongside as I searched for him, waiting for me to receive his justifying presence. He didn't reconcile me in the abstract, nor address me in the abstract, nor address me with a James Earl Jones voice from heaven as I expected.  Instead he met me in my particular situation, delivering me from my particular idols and fears, giving his indwelling and personal presence. I now recognize that Christ's presence itself enacts in my specific life the forgiveness of sins and the gift of God himself.

In countless ways, God smiles upon me, and I remember that God, as Karl Barth put it, decided never to be except to be with us. And that includes me. When I first recognized that truth, my heart sang at last in response, "Sing Your Praise to the Lord!" Now my past, present, and future cohere in the light of this diverse unity the Spirit created. Our shared sociality of addressing and responding to each other and reciprocally revealing our characters began. He is my Deliver and Reconciler, my Teacher.

I call him Teacher because Jesus himself, through the Holy Spirit, schools us in how to live along the Way of Love. In my work, I describe the Way in terms of seven critical practices: Turn. Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Yet it is not the practices themselves that correct our vision so that we see the world the way it is, but rather it is Christ himself. As we perform the practices in our contexts, he reveals a range of fitting emotions, responses, and ends given the stimuli we experience in the world. He is our Supreme Exemplar.

By steps and degrees, we learn to take the right things for granted, and, imitating him, learn to improvise in our ethical actions so that we carry on in the same way as Jesus. As I will explain over time, the practices actualize and sustain the personal relationship through which Christ's history becomes our history. In that personal relationship, we discover ourselves transformed by the renewing of our minds.

With new eyes to see, we learn it is, in fact, the Christ who bisects time.