Abide With Me
Abide / ə-ˈbīd / transitive verb
To bear patiently.
To endure without yielding.
To wait for.
To accept without objection.
I was sitting on a couch in the back of a 15-foot U-Haul in the parking lot of a storage facility, waiting for more boxes to arrive. My family is moving again, for the 15th+ time in their lives. But this time, it feels permanent. They will be moving to a home they’ve dreamed of, lost once to a fire, and rebuilt with plans of staying. This time, I won’t be going with them. I am starting to grieve that reality.
As I looked around me, I saw remnants of my childhood scattered across the truck bed. There was my red-wheeled razor scooter that sent me flying down steep driveways in Portland, armed with nothing but a helmet and the dream of invincibility. There was my little brother’s Thomas the Tank Engine set, the one my sister and I spent hours putting together just-so and he spent no time at all destroying. There was the desk I had lovingly painted as a young bride nearly ten years ago, stenciled with hopeful gold flowers at a time when I could not foresee the painful road ahead.
Growing up, we moved so many times that I have lost count. Each new home and adventure contained its own joys and each goodbye carried the grief of not knowing what “home” was anymore, of being perpetually in-between here and there. As I sat in the moving van surrounded by remnants of homes past, I was filled with a mixture of sorrow and longing. A song unexpectedly welled up in my chest, which I began to sing out loud:
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide
The darkness deepens Lord, with me abide
When other helpers fail and comforts flee
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.
I typically elect not to sing at full volume in public, but something in me simply needed to—as a prayer, a hope, and a reminder of God’s presence with my family wherever we go. As I sang, I felt cleansed of a weight I didn’t know I’d been carrying. At some point I admitted to myself that I did not know the rest of the song and had exhausted all soulful possibilities from singing the first verse over and over. Drew and my Dad were taking a while to bring the next load of boxes out, so I simply sat in silence. There are not many entertainment options outside of one’s own mind if one is sitting on a couch in the back of a moving van, waiting for boxes. Mercifully bored, I asked God if there was anything God would like to communicate to me.
The verse that came to mind immediately is from the book of Ruth. Naomi and her two daughters in law have lost everything – husbands, sons, home—and as they walk along the road that leads back to Naomi’s hometown of Bethlehem, Naomi tells them to leave her and return to their own families so they can try to find a better life. Ruth, however, insists on staying with Naomi with these famous words:
Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.
(Ruth 1:16)
It is striking to me that Ruth promised her loyalty to Naomi before they reached Bethlehem. Ruth spoke those words on a dusty road from in an in-between place, having left the place she called home and not yet reached her new home. When that verse came to mind, I sensed that God was reminding me of his promise to stay with us, both in the in-between journeys of life as well as at our destination. Wherever we go, God goes with us. Wherever we stay, God stays there too.
God is a God who abides with his people.
When I got home, I looked up the other verses of Abide with Me so I could get a little farther than verse one the next time I found myself compelled to sing a hymn from the deep recesses of a U-haul. I learned that Henry Francis Lyte penned the hymn in the mid-1800’s, and the opening lines refer to a different journey of three persons on a dusty road—Jesus and two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
The resurrected Jesus had joined his disciples as they walked toward Emmaus and revealed to them the entirety of the Old Testament scriptures which point to the Messiah. Though the disciples do not recognize him as Jesus, they eventually recognize that it is growing dark as they reach their destination. Jesus keeps walking as if to move on, but Luke 24 tells us this:
But they constrained him, saying, “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.”
(Luke 24:29a, KJV)
Do you hear it?
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide
The darkness deepens Lord, with me abide.
Just as Ruth’s promise of “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay” echoes the faithfulness of God to dwell with his people, the disciples’ plea “Abide with us” echoes Jesus’ invitation to his disciples in the final days before his death:
“Abide in Me, and I in you.”
(John 15:4a).
After exploring the Ruth and Emmaus passages, I realized that what I sensed God whisper to me in the back of the truck is true:
Abiding in God is a reciprocal reality which involves mutual desire and vulnerability.
And it is the inexhaustible love of God which allows God to desire his creation and to choose to need us as part of God’s own happiness and wellbeing. I recognize this might sound a bit lofty and even sacrilegious, but do you recall what Jesus says to his friends in the Garden of Gethsemane just before he is handed over to be crucified?
“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
(Matthew 26:38)
Stay with me in this unbearable darkness.
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.
Jesus made himself vulnerable to sorrow and to death so that we could abide in him forever. I used to think that Jesus joining the disciples on their journey to Emmaus was solely for the purpose of teaching them a lesson. But now I wonder if there was something else at play:
What if Jesus just wanted their company?
Maybe Jesus missed his friends and was excited at the chance to converse with them again—so excited that he basically said, “I can reveal all the secrets to you now! Here’s how everything you ever read in the Scriptures about the Messiah is true.”
Friends, I do not know where you are on your journey, but I do know this: whether you are just setting out, somewhere in the dusty middle, or reaching your destination, God delights to dwell with his people—so much so that he gave us his only son to draw us near. So much so that the whole point of everything—creation, fall, redemption—reveals God’s desire to abide with us forever and ever:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”
(Revelation 21:3)
In full transparency, I do not know how to land this plane. I am at a loss for how to tie the preceding 1,140 words together into a single conclusion. All I know is that my family’s moving again, my experience of singing alone in a truck, a few Bible stories, and contemplating the endless journey towards Home have all pointed me to this single phrase:
Abide with me.
I hope I have reflected this faithfully. I pray that the reality of Abide With Me as a call and response between heaven and earth has begun to echo in your own heart, as well.
In the beginning, in the middle, in the end, Abide With Us.
P.s. When I looked up the definition of Abide, I found this:
Abide: “To bear patiently. To endure without yielding. To wait for. To accept without objection.”
You know what else that sounds like? Love.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
(1 Corinthians 13:7).
In the beginning, in the middle, in the end, Love abides.
Amen.
To Go Deeper: Listen to Audrey Assad’s version of Abide With Me.