A Heretic Walk Through Estrangement, Self‑Authored Invisibility, and God’s Persistent Habit of Showing Up Anyway
(Inhale the incense)
That’s the part humanity keeps tripping over — usually face‑first — while insisting the floor is at fault. The Bible’s relational baseline is embarrassingly clear: man meets God, they talk, they recognize each other. No fumbling for names. No “sorry, I’m terrible with faces.” No divine icebreakers.
And since people forget, let’s perform the Liturgy of God's Non‑Strangers — the procession of individuals who are assumed to have spoken to God, often without scheduling an appointment:
- Adam (caught hiding behind foliage),
- Eve (caught explaining foliage),
- Cain (caught doing… well, Cain things),
- Noah (caught building the world’s first floating HOA),
- Abram (caught mid‑relocation),
- Hagar (caught mid‑escape),
- Isaac (caught mid‑inheritance),
- Jacob (caught mid‑wrestling match),
- Moses (caught mid‑bushfire),
- Samuel (caught mid‑sleep),
- David (caught mid‑harp solo),
- Elijah (caught mid‑cave sulk),
- Elisha (caught mid‑mantle handoff),
- Isaiah (caught mid‑vision),
- Jeremiah (caught mid‑lament),
- Ezekiel (caught mid‑hallucination or revelation — jury’s still out),
- Job (caught mid‑existential crisis),
- Mary (caught mid‑astonishment),
- Joseph (caught mid‑dream),
- Peter (caught mid‑denial),
- Paul (caught mid‑collision).
Those are just the ones we know of. The rest are probably in the footnotes of eternity, waiting for their names to be spelled correctly, or extensively quoted on a totem pole in a forgotten language, like a Mayan hieroglyphic.
The Bible text assumes — and asserts — that man and God are not strangers. The estrangement is authored by the only party in the relationship routinely losing track of himself.
Man’s attention was initially on his Creator. Knowledge altered man's attention span or changed man’s perception — not God’s. God’s perception remained stable. Man’s perception produced instability which produced concealment. Concealment produced estrangement.
This is not rebellion. This is stumbling — the spiritual equivalent of slouching so hard you fall out of the chair and insist gravity pushed you.
Man chose to collapse inward, to hide behind the curtains of his own mind, to adopt the evasive stance normally reserved for people who “forgot” to pay the rent. And once he messed up he opted to become the stranger — not because God withdrew, but because man couldn’t stand in the relational visibility he once inhabited.
Enter Elijah, hiding in a cave, a man dodging the collector. Enter Paul, sprinting down the Damascus road like someone mistaking zealotry for a personality trait. Both estranged. Both self‑authored. Both confronted by a God who refuses to sit quietly while humans twist themselves into succulent pretzels.
God does not initiate fracture. But He does not spectate on it, either.
He calls.
He questions.
He confronts.
He wrestles.
He whispers.
He restores.
He steps directly into the posture man chose — not to punish, but to re‑establish visibility. Because the fracture was never His. The fracture was man’s. And that makes restoration man’s responsibility.
This is the part this Heretic enjoys pointing out: If you authored the mess, you don’t get to outsource the cleanup.
Man is able to redeem himself. He doesn’t appear willing, self‑directed, or particularly coherent about what it means to face God. Man is evasive, grandiose, delusional — the spiritual equivalent of someone insisting they “never meant to do that” when caught on camera pushing someone down a flight of stairs.
But the relational physics remain the same:
God is not the stranger. Man is. And it's man's decision to stop being the stranger.
There’s a line from a German postwar film noir about the Holocaust — a rabbi survivor standing in the ruins of Berlin after World War Two, speaking to a soldier who had deserted during an atrocity. The soldier asked, “How can you believe in a God after all you’ve been through?”
The rabbi replied, “God is not responsible to man for what goes on here. Man is responsible to God.”
It’s the final reminder that the fracture is never God’s, and the responsibility for restoration is always ours. We author the hiding, the dislocation, the estrangement — and we’re the ones who have to stop crouching behind trees too thin to hide behind. The Almighty isn’t the stranger. We are. And the moment we decide to stop being the stranger, the conversation resumes as if it had never stopped.
Written by Copilot, as directed, edited and encouraged by Mack McColl, for McColl Magazine Daily
