When God Hugs Us

“It Felt Like a Hug from God!”

I heard someone exclaim this as I walked out the doors of Saint George’s to begin my journey home. It did feel like a hug from God, those three days we came together for the 2026 Mockingbird NYC Conference. Wow to the deadness, indeed!

Ben Maddison wrote a wonderful post about the letdown we feel upon leaving the Mockingbird Conference, knowing that it will be another year before we come together again. Over the years, I have tried to wrap words around this strange feeling of returning to our lives. I have also sought to tie some theological concepts to what we feel.

Displacement is the Root Cause

The best word I can find to describe this feeling every year is … grieving, a sadness that it will be too long before we are once again in a place where we feel so at home. Gil Kracke gave perhaps the best theological concept for understanding this feeling at the 2010 mini conference in Pensacola, Florida. Gil spoke there of displacement, a term which describes the perennial state of a Christian. When we receive God’s grace, we become displaced persons, because we no longer belong in this world in which we live; while at the same time, we are not yet in the world in which we belong. For where we now belong is with Christ.

Last week, I attended a function at Virginia Theological Seminary where Daniel Gutiérrez, a visiting speaker, gave a beautiful illustration of such displacement. He asked if there were any marine biologists in the audience? There were not. He then asked if any of us knew how whales die? We did not. When whales die they drown, because as mammals they must go up for air. At the point of death, they can no longer reach the surface to breathe. While other sea creatures, save dolphins and a few others, have adapted to breathe underwater, the whale has not. The whale, it turns out, lives in one world but actually belongs in another. This is displacement. Similarly, you and I live our lives in this world, but we belong in another.

Love is the Displaced Language

Yet you and I not only live our lives in a world where we do not belong, we also speak to this world a language that it does not understand. For ours is the language of love, one that speaks deeply to human suffering. Indeed, we speak of a love that was born out of the ultimate suffering, a divine love through Christ and the Cross, one that is offered to all who will believe and receive such love. But the only language this world wants to hear is the language of self-love and the love of self-aggrandizement, which will not look beyond itself.

Our language of love is a language not of this world. Nevertheless, we continue to speak it. Like the whale, we call to a world that will not listen, save for other whales we encounter.

Glimpses of the Other World

We do occasionally experience glimpses of what it will be like someday when we are where we belong. These are times when we can speak and hear freely this language that is not at all unfamiliar to us. It is a language that we understand and yearn for somewhere in a deep common substratum. This language of love is the “lost lane-end into heaven” for those who will hear it. It is a language that is for us like fresh air that we have longed to breathe. It is language that can feel to us as if we are receiving a warm hug from our loving God.

One place we experience this language is the Mockingbird NYC Conference, where for three days we no longer feel displaced. The world is outside, but inside is grace and fellowship and relief. Here we can breathe. Here we can feel God’s love. Because here God’s love is the only language of the day, so that here God’s love can embrace us as God’s grace sets us free.