The Adult In the Room

John Lennon and Yoko Ono And How I Feel Sometimes When I Want to Talk To Jesus

Collage: The Things We Lean On copyrighted 2025 xltw

I was talking to God and this Yoko and John Lennon image came to mind. I was saying, 'God, When I feel Anxious, I wish I could hug you, or rather get a hug from you. And if I hugged you in the state I'm in right now, it would look like this.' Like Yoko and John; him naked and clingly and Yoko looking a bit irritated and overwhelmed. Each part of that image would be me.

Ironically, Lennon was gunned down by Mark David Chapman about six hours after this photo was taken by famed photogragher Annie Leibowitz. Apparently, he decided he wanted to go home right after the shoot to see his young son Sean, before his child went to bed.

Almost as if he had some prescient notion of death.

In researching this blog, I was surprised to find that John Lennon--famous for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus--had a come-to-Jesus moment after listening to a sermon by Billy Graham.  Accounts claim it lasted all of two weeks, but those accounts also mention that he corresponded with the likes of Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson.

But the photo of him and Yoko reminds me a lot about how it feels to be anxious and wanting to cling onto something stable. Sometimes the things you think are stable are not, and things that seem unstable, really are.  Lord knows that being Orthodox is the hardest form of Christianity there is to be, because in it, God fully keeps his promise to heal us, to make us saints. The entire way the Church is set up is for the sole purpose of healing the soul, and bringing us into a deep relationship with Jesus Christ. And because of that, it doesn’t compromise with the world…it doesn’t change, it hasn’t changed for as long as it has existed.

However, it is a hospital, and in that hospital--at all levels--there are people who are struggling with their various sufferings and wounds. And in that process of dealing with the sufferings and the wounds, they, or rather we, are exhorted to bring it to the Lord in prayer, to get down on our knees when we feel crippled by anxiety, by racing thoughts, and by thoughts that make us enemies to our fellow man.

But most of the times, I just want a hug from God. I just want Him to embrace me, and impart that grace that will assure me that everything is going to be okay. I just want to talk to Him face to face, like a toddler talks to his mother or father, to look into His eyes, and know that He gets me, even if a lot of times I'm stumbling around with the concepts of being human. And there are times when sometimes some mystical and ethereal form of this happens:

It’s funny how I’m  starting to realise that when I pray, get down on my knees, even when it feels the most inauthentic thus I feel as though I going through the motions, and I feel that nothing is real, even questioning whether I myself am a live living being because people can be so dismissive... It may not happen right away, but God does embrace me. It’s that grace you feel when you make it to Liturgy, or a few minutes after a prayer, or a day after, and you have a sense that God is in the room, He is the adult person in your life, when you’ve never had that experience; and you can count on Him, no matter what. He hasn’t abandoned you. No. In fact, He maximizes when you finally are able to perform His will, and He minimizes when you slip up in the muddy waters in your heart.   

This year is shaping up to be the most difficult year of my spiritual life in Orthodoxy, but I’m learning to take it one step at a time, one day at a time, and learning to turn to Jesus more and more often because for the most part, He is the only adult in the room.