“Here I am.” How simple. How understated. The Living God has spoken directly to you and that is your response? Two ordinary words?
This is a piece inspired by a book I was reading recently: ‘Room for Good things to run Wild.’
“Then God spoke to Israel in the visions of the night, and said, ‘Jacob, Jacob!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’” - Genesis 46:2
“Here I am.”
How simple. How understated. The Living God has spoken directly to you and that is your response? Two ordinary words? At first, it almost struck me as complacency. Yet the longer I sat with this verse, the more I felt there was something in it written for me. A message that had perhaps always been there, but which I had somehow missed or, more truthfully, evaded. It brought to mind a passage from The Life of Saint Anthony:
“Antony, as though God had put him in mind of the Saints, and the passage had been read on his account…”St. Athanasius
That is how this verse began to feel. The Living Word of God, written for all, had suddenly become intensely personal. As though, for a moment, the passage had been read on my account. God had tugged at my ear not forcefully demanding my attention but quietly whispering the Hidden Music. Often, I find that I miss the mark the first time around whether socially, spiritually, occupationally. But perhaps that is simply part of the rhythm of life: a circling back, a second look, another attempt at understanding what was there all along.
Time travellers are we.Stephen Hawking
Perhaps we are.
So often it is only in retrospect that meaning reveals itself. We return to an old conversation and finally understand what was being said. We revisit a failure and discover what it was teaching us. We reread a familiar passage and suddenly find that it is no longer familiar at all. It is in these moments of return that revelation comes. That meaning is uncovered. That life, hidden beneath the surface of things, begins to show itself.
And so, I returned to Jacob. His response to God had initially seemed strangely understated to me. Perhaps this was because I do not deal in visions, dreams or premonitions. I cannot say that I have heard the voice of God descend upon me with unmistakable clarity. However, this revealed less about Jacob and more about me.
We tend to compare and contrast, make all kinds of value assessments based on case and power; that a vision must be different than the impressions that happen from a daily reading. But all of God’s leadings are of the same calibre. It is still the infinite, the transcendent, stepping down into the finite, drawing near and revealing Himself.Josh Nadeau
We wait for fire to fall from heaven. We wait for the vision. The dream. The unmistakable voice. We imagine that if God were truly speaking, surely, it would be dramatic enough that we could not miss it. And yet God speaks in so many ways. Through Scripture we have read a hundred times. Through a sentence that suddenly refuses to leave us alone. Through another person. Through silence. Through circumstance. Through an impression that arrives quietly and stays. Perhaps it is not that God is silent. We have simply trained ourselves to listen only for thunder. And suddenly Jacob’s response looks entirely different.
“Here I am.”
Not complacency. Not indifference. Familiarity.
There is no panic in his answer. No astonishment that the God of heaven should know his name. No desperate need to manufacture some grand response worthy of the moment.
God calls: “Jacob, Jacob.”
And Jacob answers: “Here I am.”
There is something deeply beautiful about that simplicity. The response of someone who recognises the voice that calls him. A familiarity with God so profound that the extraordinary has become intimate.
The best things are wonderful by familiarity. They inspire awe by intimacy.Josh Nadeau
That is the invitation hidden within these three simple words. Not merely to wait for God to reveal Himself spectacularly, but to become familiar enough with Him that we recognise Him when He whispers. To become attentive enough that when He calls our name, we need not ask who is speaking.
We simply answer:
“Here I am.”
A Son Far removed:
So why, then, do I still feel so far removed? Why do I so often feel like an outsider looking in on my own relationship with God? Why am I drawn toward novelty, when what I truly need is familiarity? I think the problem is not always that the mind has failed to grasp God, but that the heart remains shackled to the pleasures of the world. The mind may be convinced, yet the heart can still be captivated by the created rather than the Creator. We often reduce this tension to familiar phrases: “It’s not about knowing about God; it’s about knowing God.” One of my personal favourites is Fr Kallistos Ware’s line: “God has no grandchildren.” I have repeated sayings like these almost instinctively, handing them out like Tic-Tacs whenever the subject of relationship with God comes up.
But beneath the neatness of the phrase lies a far more difficult question: What does it actually mean to have a relationship with God? Not as a slogan. Not as something inherited from our families, absorbed from church culture, or assembled from theological knowledge. What does it mean to truly know Him, to recognise His voice, to desire His presence, and to become familiar with Him?
It is not so much knowledge that I want you to leave with, but the knowledge that knowledge is not enough. That to understand is not the same as to feel, to acknowledge is not the same as to be captivated. The journey is not one of intellect but one of the heart and where it belongs.Josh Nadeau
Called by Beauty:
Contemplating Jacob on a long drive, whilst on a journey of my own, a question came to me: Why did God give His people a Promised Land, and yet make them journey towards it?
Surely, He might have given them the land at once. But perhaps the road was part of the gift. The wilderness did something to them that the destination alone could not. It exposed what was hidden, stripped away false securities, and taught them dependence and trust. They were not merely being brought to a place; they were being made into a people capable of receiving it.
Perhaps this is why God so often gives us promises before He gives us their fulfilment. We imagine that the point is simply to arrive, while He is concerned also with what we are becoming on the way. The desert, the mountain, the waiting, even the apparent detours may all belong to the same education- the education of becoming.
And so, the spiritual life is not merely a journey because we are always moving. Sometimes the journey takes the form of stillness. Sometimes progress looks remarkably like waiting. God is not only at the end of the road. He is in the road itself, using each season to loosen our grip on what we were, until we are able to receive what He is calling us to become. Moving through different terrains: consolation and dryness, certainty and doubt, abundance and wilderness. Each reveal something within us. Each draws us deeper into the complexity of our own nature; the tension between flesh and spirit, between what desires God and what still clings to the world.
Yet the journey to the promised land was not only one of physical destination but an inward movement of His people. It was a journey which taught Jacob and co how to see. The promise of an abundant land with flowing rivers, fields aplenty, provisions of milk and honey- God was not merely giving Israel somewhere to arrive. He was teaching them how to behold.
The beauty of the gift was meant to lead them toward the Beauty of the Giver. And perhaps that is true of all creation. There is beauty in places, in people, in music, food, friendship, silence and colour. There can even be a strange beauty within struggle, not because suffering itself is beautiful, but because God can reveal Himself through it.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.Ernest Hemingway
We are formed by the road we travel, shaped and moulded by what we endure along the way. Suffering is inevitable; what distinguishes the modern-day saint is not the absence of wounds, but the manner in which they are received. Hardship may break us open, but in that brokenness, we are given the choice to seek the Great Physician, to allow His healing touch to restore and transform us. Those who refuse, who will not allow themselves to be vulnerable before Him, risk becoming lost not only to God, but even to themselves.
Creation: The Greatest Invitation
Beauty with a small b points us toward Beauty with a capital B. It beckons. It bids us further up and further in. The danger is that we stop at the created thing itself. We become captivated by the gift and forget the Giver. The heart that was meant to be awakened by beauty instead becomes satisfied with fragments of it. But true beholding does the opposite. To behold is to allow the beauty before us to awaken a deeper hunger for its Source. And here lies the paradox described by St Gregory of Nyssa: the more we see of God, the more we desire to see. Every glimpse enlarges the heart. Every encounter creates within us a greater capacity for the next.
We drink and become thirstier. We see and discover how little we have seen. We love and discover that Love is deeper still. This is why we must recover wonder.
Chesterton understood this well…
Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.G.K.Chesterton
I write this not as someone who has mastered the art of wonder, but as someone trying to recover it. I often find myself drawn to the worlds of science fiction, to their strange beauty and sense of escape, as though reality itself were somehow too ordinary.
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.G.K.Chesterton
The point is not escape from the ordinary. It is the recovery of the ordinary. And this brings me back to the journey.
Jacob had been called toward Bethel, yet toward the end of his life he found himself being asked to leave the land of promise and descend into Egypt. He hesitated. Before going, he offered sacrifice, and it was there that God spoke to him in the visions of the night:
“Jacob, Jacob.” “Here I am.”
God reassured him not to fear going down into Egypt because He Himself would go with him. And suddenly the Promised Land means something deeper. God was never teaching Jacob that His presence could be contained within certain borders. Jacob could descend into Egypt and still belong to God because God went with him. The promise was not merely a place, but presence. Therefore, location became irrelevant.
The desire is for Christ to become the lens through which the cosmos is understood. In Him, ordinary things are not so much transformed as revealed for what they truly are. The tree remains a tree. Bread remains bread. The face of a friend remains the face of a friend. And yet somehow, they begin to speak. They become signs. Whispers. Invitations- beauty calling us toward Beauty.
Perhaps this is what C.S.Lewis was describing when he wrote
But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow.C.S.LEWIS
‘Jesus is the bright shadow, that looms over everything transforming all common things- less transforming them and more revealing to us just how uncommonly Beautiful His world is.’
To Conclude:
Perhaps, then, the task of the spiritual life is not to escape the ordinary, nor even to spend our lives searching for the extraordinary, but to become the sort of people who can recognise the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary. To learn that Egypt may contain God just as surely as Bethel; that the wilderness may be as much a gift as the Promised Land; that beauty is not an end in itself, but an invitation; and that even our wounds may become places through which grace enters.
We spend so much of life asking God to reveal Himself, while perhaps He is teaching us how to see. We ask for signs while standing among them. We ask Him to speak while the whole world is quietly bearing His fingerprints. The road, the waiting, the people we love, the things we lose, the beauty that arrests us for a moment - all of it can become part of that education of the heart.
And perhaps holiness is simply the slow recovery of this attention. To become familiar enough with God that we no longer require thunder to know that He has spoken; to become free enough that we can follow Him whether He leads us toward the land of promise or down into Egypt; to become awake enough that Beauty, wherever it finds us, turns our eyes toward Him.
Then when The Almighty God calls out to you, there will be no need for some grand reply. Only the response of one who has finally learned to recognise the Voice:
Here I am.
Written by
A Fellow Pilgrim
