There are moments in our lives that have embossed themselves into our memories. Attached to a strong emotion or event, these scenes remain understandably alive in our minds. Other memories remain tucked away less explicably. We cannot articulate why they have made the indelible imprint that they have. Nor can we explain why they return to the forefront of our minds when they do.

I recalled one such moment recently—a snippet of a conversation more than a decade ago. It is odd that I would recall the conversation at all. At the time, the exchange seemed casual, one of many countless exchanges that bounce out of the mind as quickly as they enter. It was one of many conversations with a trusted mentor and friend, but her words at the time seemed little more than a simple, obvious thought. Yet somehow I remembered presently the concern, unbeknownst to me then, with which she spoke those words. She looked at me and said, “Jill, God needs you to receive the things God places in front of you.” Like a sweater on a warm day, I took her words in their simplicity, and casually tossed them aside. But somewhere in the depths of my mind, they were apparently tucked away until I would stumble across them in another light.

“O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not have it.” This powerful lament of Christ, recorded in both Luke and Matthew’s Gospels, reminds us that the people of Jerusalem were not indifferent to God. They thought they knew God; in fact, they often thought they were acting on God’s behalf. In Matthew’s Gospel this lament is spoken on the heels of seven woes to the scribes and Pharisees—two other groups who genuinely believed they were fighting to protect the God and the religion they they knew. In Luke’s Gospel, significantly, Christ’s lament follows an invitation toward the narrow door of the kingdom of God.

A great majority of the world today reports some belief in the existence of a divine being. One study on faith and belief among America’s youth describes this often generic credence as belief in a God who wants us to be both good and happy, and who is available in case of emergencies. Sociologist Christian Smith describes this widespread outlook in American teenagers—even across different religious backgrounds—as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” “We have convinced ourselves that this is the gospel,” writes a commenter on these findings, “but in fact it is much closer to another mess of pottage, an unacknowledged but widely held religious outlook that is primarily dedicated, not to loving God, but to avoiding interpersonal friction.”(1)

Jesus’s potent lament and metaphor of a hen who longs to reach out to her chicks proclaims the often tragic nature of our professions and what we attempt to receive in the midst of them—whether denying God altogether, casually professing belief in a distant being, or holding firmly to religion and somehow missing love for God in the process. How oft I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not have it. The story of humanity seems very often a story of people missing the point; people who don’t even know what we don’t know.

There are certainly many ways of receiving God and the promises of Christ, though we might find in the end that in our receiving we were more realistically trying to avoid something else. The word “receive” in the dictionary lists more than a dozen definitions ranging from “to hear or see,” and “to greet or welcome,” to more weighty definitions such as “to acknowledge formally and authoritatively” or “to bear the weight of.” Examples from human behavior are equally diverse.

At the time of my mentor’s words, I had thoroughly committed myself to the Christian story. The Christian God, I believed, provided the only answers that could really speak to the difficult questions of life. I had thoroughly accepted Christ and considered myself a part of the story of Christianity. Yet I was constantly questioning in my mind whether I knew God personally and often doubted my own identity as a child of God. I know now that my friend was saying that there is an intensely practical side to receiving God that I was missing. There is a point when we must be still and recognize just who we are receiving, just who has been reaching out to gather us all along.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus proclaims, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (10:15). The Greek word for “receive,” literally means to take with the hand, to take hold of, and to embrace. Much has been said in scholarship of this reference to coming to God as a little child. Jesus’s use of the word “receive” is equally picturesque. The image painted in the text is certainly worth many words, two figures meriting an impression on both mind and memory. To believe that the God of the scriptures exists is to believe that we as people now stand in the presence of God as a Person. To receive God is to reach out to the very arms that have been longing to gather us near all along.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.