Easter tells us that we are missed

Our best relationships hint at what we are really missing.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

A persons stands, holding a net curtain aside to gaze out.

Max Harlynking on Unsplash.

I never thought that God could miss me, but recently I’ve begun to wonder if he does.

Is there a person in your life that you just love spending time with? Maybe this person is a family member, a friend, colleague, neighbor, or maybe your spouse. As time has gone on in your life you now realize how special that person is to you. You think of the ease, the peace, the low heartbeat, lightheartedness, and depth of feeling that you’ve experienced all in simply being with that person and spending time with them.

As you think of that person, can you remember a time when there was a longer-than-usual gap between your visits? Maybe weeks, months, years. What was it like when you met up or talked to this special friend of yours after the hiatus? What did it feel like?

I have someone like this. His name is Andrew. He is my cousin, but I’ve generally thought of him as the brother I never had. We grew up together separated by only one year in age. My childhood is filled with memories of playing with him in different sports, games, wrestling, arguing, disagreeing, pranking each other, late-night fast-food runs, (which I no longer recommend), and eventually working long shifts on low sleep together. We were in each other’s wedding parties. We have experienced a lot of life together.

As time has gone on, and I now live on the other side of the continent, we have not been able to see each other as often as we would like.

But recently, he had a special work trip close to the Pacific Northwest, so he made time for a short stay with us near Seattle. On one day, I took him out for street tacos near the ocean and we were able to get some unhurried time to catch up. Throughout his visit I just kept thinking how much I had missed spending time with Andrew. He and I both expressed as much.

If you have just one of those friendships in life, you have hit the ball out of the park. And if you have two or three of those friendships, you’ve hit a grand slam. These friendships are unique.

For me, one of the most striking and poignant questions throughout the Bible is when God asks Adam “Where are you?”

As a theologian by education, I often think of these relational traits when it comes to God. Fundamental to Christian belief is that we can, despite how infinitely different he is to us, relate to God. There is a great deal of mystery to this idea, to be sure, but I’ve wondered long and hard what this looks like. In the long history of Christian thought, scholars, pastors, and theologians have pointed to Jesus Christ to help make sense of this massive, otherworldly concept.

The Hebrew Scriptures reveal what God is like in creation, miracles, acts of grace, displays of power and many other aspects. But when we are searching to understand how God relates to us as human beings, it is Jesus Christ who gives us the primary lens through which we can understand that quality of relationship. The interactions he has with his friends, leaders, children, and teachers are especially revealing. The way he heals people, enjoys meals with others, gives time to the outsiders, and speaks to the uptight religious types is all very instructive in how God relates to us as human beings.

Over the last few years, I have become increasingly interested in the questions that Jesus asks people. Jesus’s questions reveal to us what he is like.

“Why do you call me good?”

“Who do you say that I am?”

“Whose image is on this coin?”

“Will you also leave me?”

“What do you want me to do for you?”

These and many more have caused me to explore further the questions that God asks people because maybe his questions, sometimes more than his statements, reveal what makes him different.

For me, one of the most striking and poignant questions throughout the Bible is when God asks Adam “Where are you?” Since childhood I’ve wondered what God was doing in asking that question. God was not asking a geographical question; it’s not as though his internal GPS was confused in the garden of Eden. But if not a geography question, was God then playing an intellectual game with Adam and Eve? Perhaps, but that is increasingly doubtful, given the enormous stakes in that narrative (brokenness had just entered the world) as well as the message we read throughout the rest of the Bible: God takes people seriously.

Recently I wrote to my friend and leading Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke to see what he thought about God’s question to Adam. Perhaps you’ll find an excerpt of his answer as enlightening as I have:

The omniscient God is not asking because he does not know. He is asking a real question -- this is not a charade -- to show his involvement with Adam--both an historical and archetype of humanity -- to provoke him to engage with him in dialogue. In short, God misses his fellowship.

God is asking Adam where he is because he misses him.

Waltke’s answer to my question makes God’s question to Adam into a sign of his love for Adam, and he goes further to explain that this dialogue is “an historical and archetype of humanity”. If nothing else, it means that this is the way in which God views his relationship with us. God enjoys being with us and interacting with us. And when the relationship grows cold, he misses us.

Could it be possible that when we move away from God, he notices? He misses us?

The British writer Julian Barnes begins his poignant memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of with the words, “I do not believe in God, but I miss him.” Those words set the tone for a book in which Barnes writes about his complicated and fraught relationship with the transcendent. In his book, Barnes expresses his curiosity about what God is like. And amidst the deep and rich thoughts woven throughout the book, the reader never encounters the idea that while Barnes misses God, it might also be true that the God on the other side of the equation misses him.

To be honest, in all my thinking about God, it is just now that I am beginning to ponder the thought that when I move away from God on some level, he misses me. Could it really be possible that the God of creation misses me?

Could it be possible that when we move away from God, he notices? He misses us? God’s question to Adam, punctuated by Christ the Lord restoring the severed relationship through his death on the cross and resurrection, demonstrates God’s great capacity to love us.

As we approach Easter, wherever we might find ourselves on the spectrum of belief: whether we attend church, synagogue, temple, mosque or none; whether we have faith -- a little faith, beleaguered faith, or no faith -- the story of God asking that penetrating question to Adam and ultimately coming to us in Christ is the supreme portrait of what God is like. Easter reminds us that the nature of God’s love is such that when we walk away, God feels that loss, he misses us, and he comes looking for us.

Review

Belief

Books

Culture

28 May 2025

4 min read

Could Lamorna Ash become a Christian in a year?

Moving, funny and beautifully written, this young writer’s quest for faith has lessons for all of us.

Lucy Denyer

Lucy is a writer and editor.

Lamorna Ash.

When two of Lamorna Ash’s university friends decided to leave behind their lives as standup comedians and train to become priests, Ash was fascinated. She interviewed them and wrote an essay about it for the Guardian but, by the time her piece came out, knew she was “not finished with Christianity.”

“Perhaps it was naive not to have anticipated how spending my days alongside two fresh converts… would have some cumulative effect on me,” she writes. “Through these encounters, it was as if the very corner of the sky had been pulled back. I couldn’t see what was going on behind it, but I understood it was there for them… they taught me how to believe in the belief of others… their stories became the starting point.”

And so Ash bought a second hand Toyota Corolla, stocked the glove box with CDs and set off on a Christian road-trip around the country that started with a Christianity Explored course and ended with a series of meetings with people who were consciously ‘dechurching’, taking in Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Quakers, Anabaptists and a YWAM community along the way. She books in ‘desert times’ on Iona; in Walsingham; at a silent Jesuit retreat. She walks, and talks, and tries to pray and thinks. Throughout her travels, Ash carried a ‘jokey’ question in the back of her mind to frame her research: could she become a Christian in a year?

The result of her quest is this book: tender, fascinating, moving, funny and beautifully written. Throughout my reading of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever I kept thinking of people I would like to give it to, Christian and non-Christian alike. Ash has achieved a remarkable feat: to make faith and its pursuit a compelling subject regardless of whether you’re a believer or not.

Primarily, this is because she has not - joke question aside - set out with an agenda, other than to more fully understand what makes believers tick (and, she admits, because it is something to write about). Though she is scathing about Rico Tice, whom she finds performative and evasive, and finds the dogma of the Christianity Explored course too rigid and inflexible for her liking, she is sympathetic towards and interested in her fellow Christianity Explored small group companions - and is self-aware enough to admit that during this time she “played the worst version of myself: hackles raised, on alert, unable to let a conversation pass without some interjection”. Though she finds the intensity of Youth With A Mission’s community - along with the fact that many of the staff are married to each other - a bit much, she is individually drawn to some of the people who work there, and reflective about what and why they’re doing. As someone who has grown up with faith, it is fascinating to see what we often take for granted held up to scrutiny by someone who is not there to be deliberately combative, but to try and understand.

“I am still too close to it to tell you definitively all the ways the encounters… changed me,” Ash writes. “What it felt like at the time, though, was that each conversation was leading me to places in my own mind I had never visited before.”

There are elements of Ash’s book I am intrigued by, but sceptical of: her suggestion, for example, that the Bible should not stop where it does, but might be continually added to, “like a divine Wikipedia, updated in perpetuity.” Her theological understanding is not, perhaps understandably, advanced. She is a self-confessed product of her era: young, progressive, queer, and her readings of and understandings of other people are framed through that lens.

But despite its failings, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever remains compelling because of its curiosity - a curiosity that Ash wonders might be the place “where God exists”; its attempts, however stumbling, to understand faith rather than just dismiss it. It is an atheist Quaker who teaches Ash “how I might approach Christianity: it was supposed to be a challenge.” You will have to read it to learn where Ash herself ends up, but her book extends the challenge to those of us who might benefit from a similar scrutiny of what we believe - not to fall out of faith, but also to understand it, and God, more.

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