I have been circling one line from Augustine’s Confessions for a few days now. Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you. He wrote that near the end of his life, looking back at years spent chasing God in all the wrong directions, through the things God had made rather than through God himself.

What gets me is what comes right after that line. He says God was with him, but he was not with God. Not that God was hiding or far off. He was the one who had wandered.

I know that feeling better than I would like to admit. I have gone looking for peace in work finished well, in a full calendar, in being needed. All of it good, none of it God. And the whole time, near as my own breath, was the thing I was actually looking for.

Augustine is one of the names on this month’s list of witnesses, and this is why. Not because he had it figured out early. Because he eventually stopped, turned around, and found God had not moved an inch.

Today I am trying something small. Before I reach for the next task, I am pausing just to notice that he is already here. Not arriving. Already here. That is the whole exercise. Late is still not too late.

Today’s Bible Study

Paul says something close to this to a crowd in Athens who had never read a line of Scripture. He tells them people search for God, feeling their way toward him, and yet he is not far from any of us, for in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:27 to 28). I like that this was said to people who had never heard the name of Christ before that afternoon. The nearness was not something only Augustine, centuries later, had to discover for himself. It was already true, for anyone, long before he got there.

Recommended Reading

If this one line caught you the way it caught me, Book Ten of the Confessions, where it comes from, is worth sitting with on its own. Augustine spends pages before that line describing exactly where he went looking instead, which is what makes the line land as hard as it does when it finally comes.