Use Me: Spiritual Objectification, and the Difference Between Access and Abiding

"Use me." It is a real prayer, and the wanting in it was never the problem.

People pray it in their cars. They sing it with wet eyes and mean every word. Being used by God is a genuine biblical good, and this book does not sneer at it or at the people who long for it.

The trouble is the road it can quietly become.

Availability becomes the offering. Fruitfulness becomes the evidence. Being useful becomes the proof that things are well between us — and somewhere in there, usefulness stops being something we do and becomes who we are. Nobody decides to make that trade. Every step is taken by somebody who loves God, and most of them are praying the whole way. The road ends where Micah found it in the eighth century: the machinery running beautifully, the language perfectly intact, the relationship absent.

The argument is one line long. Access is not intimacy.

The veil was torn from the top. Hebrews says so in the indicative — accomplished, finished, nothing to earn — and then, one verse later, asks us to draw near. If access and nearness were the same thing, that second verse would have nothing left to ask for. It asks anyway.

That gap is the whole book.

Dr. Donetta D. Quinones — licensed mental health counselor and licensed professional counselor in Washington, Texas, and Connecticut, and founder of GraceRoot Relationship Healing Institute — maps it with four realms, named for what we are doing rather than for what God is to us: Awareness, knowing about Him. Transaction, exchanging with Him. Participation, working for Him. Presence, being with Him.

They are not ranks, and most of us move through three of them before lunch. But one is the deceptive one, and it is the realm the title is about. Participation looks like intimacy from outside, and usually from inside. A person can serve faithfully there for thirty years and never pass the second veil, and nobody would have any reason to say something was wrong. There is no symptom. The innermost room simply has no job in it — which is exactly why somebody whose standing rests on being useful finds it so hard to enter.

Read with no condemnation, and that is structural rather than decorative.

Worked through Amos, Micah, Jonah, Obadiah, and Ezekiel, this is a trauma-informed study of a pattern nearly every believer runs — the narrator included. It will not tell you where you stand with God, diagnose your church, or interpret your circumstances. Your dryness is not a report card. Every chapter uses motivational-interviewing and Socratic questions rather than exhortation, and every chapter ends with real words for a younger child and for a teenager.

Micah asks the question this book exists to serve: is it not for you to know?

The distance between ignorance and willful corruption is the whole distance, and recognition offered early is how the first never hardens into the second.

A person who recognizes this in themselves has not failed. They have arrived in time.

And it closes where Moses did — handed the land, the promise, and an angel to go ahead of him, with the Person withheld. He turned it down. If Your Presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here.

Do we love God for who He is, or for what He provides?