Exodus 33:11 · World English Bible
Yahweh spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. He turned again into the camp, but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, didn’t depart from the Tent.
One man talks with God as easily as friends talk, then walks back into the busy camp. A younger one simply cannot bear to leave the tent where that nearness lives.
From the Sufism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SUFISM
One man talks with God as easily as friends talk, then walks back into the busy camp. A younger one simply cannot bear to leave the tent where that nearness lives. His lingering is the healthy opposite of a common coldness, the heart that treats God as a duty to finish and hurry away from.
The cure is to want the nearness itself, to stay a little longer at the door out of love rather than obligation. And God is present as the friend on the other side of that closeness, meeting whoever comes as a friend meets a friend, plainly and without distance.
Sufism lens
Where in your day do you finish with God a little too quickly, and what would it cost you to linger?
Krishna speaks to Arjuna not from a throne but from the seat beside him, as charioteer and companion, and the teaching lands because the distance is gone.
Dogen taught that sitting is not a means to a later result: practice and awakening are one thing, so there is nothing waiting at the end to hurry toward. The one who sits only to be finished has not yet sat.
He taught that God is reached by longing rather than by learning, and that a plain person who wants nearness stands closer than a scholar who has finished his pages and gone home.
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Sufism