[The 19th century English poet] Samuel Taylor Coleridge described how his own [son], then three-years-old, awoke in the night and called to his mother. "Touch me, only touch me with your finger," the young boy pleaded. The child's mother was astonished.

"Why?" she asked.

"I'm not here," the boy cried. "Touch me, Mother, so I may be here."

Donald Miller quoted this story and then observed, "Essentially, we are all calling out for God to touch us that we may know we are here, and yet he waits, and we go untouched and seek out the knowing we exist in a thousand other ways."