Draw Me Deeper, Lord

I've had three memory verses for myself this past week, and the main one has been James 4:7-8. I always focused on the first part of those verses. "Resist the devil and he will flee from you." But I was starting to think that that idea was ridiculous. Satan is everywhere we turn in this world. At school, at work, in the community, he is very active. And "bad company corrupts good morals," so all of the sin around me was weighing me down. I found all of these horrible thoughts just sticking in my mind. And I resisted, and I resisted, and I resisted, and satan didn't seem to be running for the hills. What is the problem with this picture?
Well, if you continue on past "and he will flee from you," you get to what I think James meant by "resist." It's not just to "avoid" it, "fight" it, or "get away" from it. Alongside resisting, James says to "Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you." Do you see the contrast?
I'm sick of what is going on in the world today! I'm sick of its influence on my own mind and on my own life! And I don't want to be any part of it! But if something is going to be done about it, and if my life is going to be changed, then I don't just need to resist what is bad; I need to seek what is good.
I took a drive the other day. Just drove. Didn't care where. I eventually made it to the middle of nowhere and stopped, one hundred miles or so from where I started. And I found God there. There have been times when I have gone out into the woods, and found God there. Sometimes I paint images of Jesus, and I find Him there. But what aggrivates me is that when I come back, where is He then? When I go somewhere, I find Him; when I come back, when "the music fades," God seems far from me once again.
I think I know why now. It's not the going to a special place. It's not doing some special activity. It's not doing something or going somewhere out of the ordinary that I find God. It's the fact that I'm trying to draw near to Him in those moments, and He responds by drawing near to me. So I don't have to take long drives or paint pictures (though they still are refreshing); I just have to open up my heart to God and seek Him with all of it, and there I will find Him.
"And I pour out my soul deep within me. From deep within me, I pour out my soul. Draw me deeper, Lord, deeper, Lord, in You. Draw me deeper, Lord, deeper, Lord, in You."

I Just Don't Understand It...

God's love and grace and mercy is such an enigma to me. Not only does He know every sin I've ever committed; not only does He remember every time I came to Him on my knees and then turned around and messed up again; He knows every sin that I'm going to commit, for the rest of my life! He knows my mind, my heart, my speech, my deeds; He knows it all. And yet the Bible says that He has no condemnation for me? And yet His word says that nothing can separate me from His love?
It doesn't make sense! Why? Because I don't know that I could love someone who had wronged me like that. If I knew every mistake a person would make against me: the treason, the treachery, the offenses, I don't know if I could bare to be around them. And when I wrong someone else, I expect them to be angry, upset, and unforgiving. So if that is how humans deal with one another in love, I don't understand why God wouldn't, right?
Well, think of it like this: are we trying to understand God as from a human point of view? Are we trying to make God in our image, instead of the other way around?
God is not human. He is not finite. He has no start and has no end. He is eternal. And that enables His love to be unlimited.
It absolutely doesn't make sense to me. I mess up and I feel like God should want nothing to do with me. That's what seems natural. But the reality is, if His Word is true, that He still wants to love me, forgive me, and use me.
Whoa...
As Paul put it in Ephesians 3, it's good to try and wrap our minds around how much Christ loved us, but we can never fully get it because He loved us beyond understanding.

"For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God."