Just One Word:
Abide
Lora Parsons
The Ashland Beacon
Last month I told you the story of my long, winding, roundabout trip to Westwood, where I blatantly ignored my GPS directions repeatedly, deciding instead to trust my own faulty sense of direction for some odd reason. While my non-GPS trip resulted in a few extra miles on my odometer, it ended up not being an entire waste. I heard that song I told you about as I drove home. It had the word “align” in it that further drove home the meaning of that whole trip: that it’s imperative that I follow God’s will for my life, because His path is always best. “Teach me to align” was the way the author of that song worded his or her take on this life lesson.
Except there is no song that says those words, and there is no author that wrote those words. This is where admission of guilt number two comes along, following last month’s admission that I’m terrible with directions. I’m also equally terrible with song lyrics. My family (lovingly?) makes fun of me all the time, because I – along with all kinds of other sub in similar lyrics when I don’t know the real ones. I don’t do this on purpose, though. I’ve found that I almost always have a song going through my mind, but I usually don’t “hear” it consciously. When I leave school at the end of a day of teaching, I often find that the song that’s been stuck in my head all day subconsciously is one I’d heard on the morning drive to school or it’s whatever was sung at church the previous Sunday as the special. It stays there, beneath the surface, ready to show itself when my mind calms. In those moments, I find that some of the words have been just slightly tweaked, if I’m paying close attention to what I’m singing internally. The substituted new word is usually one with a similar letter and syllable pattern. It could be a rhyming word, but it also could be what we might think of as a cousin to the actual word(s) from the song. In my new version for example, words like “life” and “fire” might be interchangeable. By the time I made it in the house last month after hearing this new song, the switch had happened between “align” and the actual word of the song I heard.
To write accurately about the line of the song, I talked to the people I get to spend most of my time with. None of them knew the song when I shared the details that I could recall. I sang the song to them. It wasn’t helpful. I Googled phrases, looked at K-Love’s past listening list, sang the song to my Google search bar – twice …. and still nothing. To find the artist’s name or song title – anything at all – I emailed the K-Love team. I didn’t want to write an article about a song without those two pieces of information in it! I clicked “send” and I waited. But I had a deadline to meet, and it was about to expire. I had to submit.
The day after the column was printed, I got a response from K-Love with the ACTUAL information I needed, but it was already too late. In an attempt to right that wrong, this month’s word is a cousin to “align,” following the same letter pattern, containing the same number of letters, and carrying out the same short a, long I vowel sound pattern. This month’s word, though, does have a position in a song with both a title and an author: “Abide” by Aaron Williams and Dwell Songs. The last line that I thought I heard so clearly says: “Draw me close and teach me to abide.”
In reading over those words again, I’m reminded of exactly why that song struck such a chord with me when I heard it for the first time last month. The word “abide” is, of course, a state that we should want to be in constantly when it comes to God. Being in His presence – staying put in front of Him, beside Him, near to Him – however we see His presence in connection to ours – is what our goal should always be. We should never want to stray away from where He is.
The fact that He allows our spirit to have that space, to access Him in such a close, intimate way, through Jesus is more than we can fathom at times, knowing ourselves like we do. How could He want to be in connection with the flawed, messed up versions of ourselves that we so often bring to Him? Even with our incomplete understanding of that part of who He is, we have evidence of the fact that He wants us just as we are. That’s contained in the first half the line of this song. “Draw me close.” We can’t abide until we’re sufficiently drawn in.
We find proof of that in the woman at the well in the book of John. Jesus meets her there as she’s come to draw water, and He, instead, offers her Himself – Living Water. Verse seven of chapter four says: “Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’” In order to follow that request and meet this need Jesus expresses; she would have had to draw closer to Him. She would have had to close the space that likely existed between the two of them, she being a Samaritan, He being a Jew, she being a woman, He being a male, she being a sinner, He being the perfect Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He had stepped toward her in going to the well in the first place, and she would have had to step toward Him in order to hand Him the drink. He came close. She did as well.
Jesus doesn’t shy away from sinful people repeatedly in the Bible. Tax collectors, adulterers, murderers, liars, those who are money hungry. He meets them at their place of need. He draws close to us so we can draw close to Him. Then – and only then – can we abide with Him, both now as we walk toward our eternal home and in the forever where our abiding won’t feel as much like separation as it does now. We can abide now with Him through fellowship with other believers, through reading His Word, through prayer, and through worship until we can permanently abide with Him in eternity. He draws us now, and He’ll draw us then so we can always abide with Him. “Draw me close [over and over] and teach me to abide.”
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