Attachment begins in the first few months of life, but it is the continuous presence of a mother in the first 18 months that is the first step in building a deep and lasting sense of emotional security in a child. This security forms the basis of a child’s sense of self for the rest of life. Bonding is putting the pieces together and attachment is gluing them into place.

A 30-year old-man is like a densely populated city. Nothing new can be built, in its heart, without something else being torn down.

There are many people who think they want to be a matador, only to find themselves in the ring with 2,000 pounds of bull bearing down on them, and then they discover that what they really wanted was to wear tight pants and hear the crowd roar.

I will not abandon you as orphans….I am coming back for you.

Friends, there is much to hope for in the face of our apparent waywardness with God and our nagging discontent. 

Christianity has tended to focus on right beliefs and right choices as the keys for personal growth. But biblical evidence and modern brain science show that our character is shaped more by whom we love than what we believe.

What if coming home to a new and secure attachment to God is the primary definition of salvation? 

All of life is a coming home. Salesmen, secretaries, coal miners, bee keepers, sword swallowers, all of us. All the restless hearts of the world, trying to find a way to go home. It's hard to describe how I felt then. Picture yourself walking for days in a driving snow. You don't even know you're walking in circles...the heaviness of your legs in the drifts, your shouts disappearing into the wind. How small you can feel. How far away home can be.

Home.

The dictionary defines it as both a place of origin and a goal or destination. The storm? The storm was all in my mind. Eventually I would find the right path, but in the most unlikely place.

– Patch Adams

Where have you taken your soul's need for unearned love?

In what or in whom do you seek a sense of unconditional belonging?

Where do you regularly feel joyful, nourished, and satisfied? 

In Isaiah 66, God unveils the secret to these questions with a promise brimming with hope and possibility:

“You newborns can satisfy yourselves

  at her nurturing breasts.

Yes, delight yourselves and drink your fill

    at her ample bosom.

God’s Message:

I’ll pour robust well-being into her like a river,

    the glory of nations like a river in flood.

You’ll nurse at her breasts,

    nestle in her bosom,

    and be bounced on her knees.

As a mother comforts her child,

    so I’ll comfort you.

    You will be comforted in Jerusalem.

You’ll see all this and burst with joy

  —you’ll feel ten feet tall—

As it becomes apparent that God is on your side.”

If this is God’s intention, then what's gone wrong? What is in the way of growing our attachment and attunement to God? Why do we find ourselves wanting and even genuinely loving God, yet continuing to attach our hearts and hopes to so many other things? 

Join Cherie and me in Part 1 of this series as we explore the hope of a palpable attachment to the living God as our Source of pleasure, joy, and comfort—a secure attachment through which we could feel ten feet tall, overflowing with loyal love for our Father’s good and precious world.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan

Taking Action:

List three unhealthy ways you seek comfort.

List three healthy ways you seek comfort.

What is the condition of your attachment to God? Not beliefs, or theology, but your operational, daily practice. 

In prayer and with God, explore this PDF.

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

There simply is no distinction between sacred and unsacred work in the world. 

Now I have had most of the life I am going to have, and I can see what it has been. I can remember those early years when it seemed to me I was completely adrift, and time when, looking back, at earliest times, it seemed I had been wandering in the dark woods of error. But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me, unbroken, and maybe even as straight as possible, from one end to the other, and I have this feeling, which never leaves me anymore that

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in"; aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health your main and direct object you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.

We all need a witness to the particularities of our story, someone who takes in and holds everything from banal trivialities to what is so horrendous it can barely be seen, let alone spoken. Even truer, however, is that we are a proxy witness for the One who reminds us that our life is seen and held by a great cloud of witnesses.