Learning About Leaning

There's a scene that often comes back to me from the sweet and sentimental comedy While You Were Sleeping. Our heroine, Lucy, is falling in love with Jack, the brother of the man she thought she was in love with (it's a twisty plot). Neither of them has confessed their feelings for each other yet, but Jack finds himself getting jealous over the perceived attentions of Lucy's oddball neighbor. He explains that he thought that the neighbor man was "leaning" into Lucy, which in Jack's understanding means the two are especially close.

"Leaning?" Lucy asks, somewhat blankly. Yes, leaning. It's a funny, sweet scene because Jack (played by Bill Pullman in his younger years) proceeds to try to explain to her what he means by leaning. He moves in close to her, explaining that only people who feel very close or very drawn to one another find themselves "leaning." The oddball neighbor (whose intentions, as it turns out, are mostly harmless) happens by at that time and proceeds to prove Jack's point. "Is he bothering you? Because it looks like he's leaning."

I've been thinking a lot about leaning lately, and what it means in the spiritual life. Despite growing up with the hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," it's not a concept I've thought of much in connection to my relationship with God. But lately I find myself thinking of it a lot, perhaps because I am finding myself recognizing how much I need to lean. How much I need to be literally held up, sustained by the love and strength of God.

It turns out that "leaning" on God is a biblical image, and one that really does conjure up intimacy, especially the closeness of a parent/child. But it's not just the kind of leaning described in the sweet scene of a romantic movie (though that does make me smile) the kind of leaning where someone draws protectively close to someone else. Biblical leaning has to do with recognizing our essential reliance on the God who sustains us and who holds the world in being, in whom all things cohere. And it's a reliance that starts, according to the Psalmist, before we're ever aware of it, before we're even born:

"Upon you I have leaned from before my birth; you are he who took me from my mother's womb. My praise is continually of you." (Psalm 71:6)

So leaning on God is our essential state, the way we're created to be. He's the one who watches over us even as we shelter, hidden, in our mother's womb. He's the one who sustains us and brings us into the light of day, the first of many deliverances the Lord graciously provides to his people.

Sin and its power can be described in a lot of apt ways, ways that help us to understand its dangers and how it can corrupt and subvert God's plans and purposes for us. Missing the mark, being twisted or bent, turned inward, are all ways of describing or thinking about sin. But I've been thinking lately about sin also causing us to lean in the wrong direction. We lean away from God (thus moving out of the close circle of his arms) and often end up trying to lean on other things, expecting they will hold us up or sustain us, only to discover how unstable and unsteady those things are. Part of our restoration, when we begin to walk with the Lord, is that he draws us back to the close circle of his arms and helps us begin to lean on him again. Notice the use of the word in this verse from Isaiah, which describes how the people of Israel will be day be returned from their captivity to Assyria and restored to right relationship with God:

"In that day the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the house of Jacob will no more lean on him who struck them, but will lean on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth." (Isaiah 10:20)

Even once we're restored and in right relationship with God, we still sometimes find ourselves moving away from him and leaning on the wrong things. Sometimes this is obvious, and other times more subtle, but sometimes we find ourselves more dependent on external things (for happiness, peace, comfort, security) than on God himself. And when that happens, we need to repent, literally turn around, and lean back into God.

He wants us to lean. He welcomes our leaning. He remembers what we're made of (remember, he is the One who knit us together in the first place!). Perhaps a great deal of our spiritual disciplines -- prayer, solitude, study, service -- are really all about learning to lean closer and closer into him. Lean deeper. Lean with the sure and certain knowledge that he won't let us fall. And as we lean in, we discover, much to our paradoxical delight, that we are able to move outward -- not in wrong or hasty directions (looking for sustenance and security where there isn't any) but in freedom and joy, like a rooted tree, pliable in the wind.

Lord, let us lean.