Belden Lane offers a terrifying and thrilling proposition: perhaps God is truly playful. When we experience God’s absence, perhaps God is “like a mother playfully hiding from her child or a lover playing hard to get, God hides from those God loves, occasionally playing rough for love’s sake. The purpose of God’s apparent absence, of God’s hiding, is to deepen in the lover a longing for the one loved, to enhance the joy experienced when fear dissolves and the separated are rejoined.”
